MINING
Brazil was for more than a hundred years after the discovery of placer deposits in the interior the source of important gold exports; altogether she is estimated to have yielded gold worth more than a hundred million pounds sterling, but her fame diminished with the exhaustion of the gold-bearing river sands. It was easy enough to wash out gold grains with the bateia, but when it became necessary to seek mother lodes and to use machinery, native capital and technical skill were lacking. Two gold-mining companies are working today in Brazil, both British owned and operated, and both in the State of Minas Geraes. One, at Morro Velho, property of the S. João del Rey Mining Company, is worked at a depth of a mile and a quarter, pays dividends regularly, and is a standing tribute to British energy and skill: it is a magnificent social organization as well as an engineering triumph.
The second company of importance using modern equipment is that of Passagem, close to the old capital of Minas Geraes, Ouro Preto; it is excellently operated, but has not had equal good fortune with the Morro Velho mine. In 1916 Brazil’s gold exports, in bars, weighed 4,564,523 grams, were worth about £480,000, and went entirely to England, but Brazil subsequently forbade gold exports, and now takes over all the product.
A certain amount of Brazilian gold is absorbed internally every year by the excellent native goldsmiths, for the fabrication of special jewellery objects, but no estimate of the value is obtainable.
Until diamonds were found in South Africa Brazil was the cradle of the most important diamonds put on foreign markets; the stones are still sought by native garimpeiros, mostly, in the interior of Minas and Bahia, and from the grutas of the latter State are obtained the finest white diamonds known. But they have practically disappeared from export lists together with the black carbonados, even more valuable, for a reason commented upon by the Diario Official of Bahia, discussing 1915 trade: “If diamonds and carbonados have been, since the war, sent to Europe or North America, their exportation, which is for the most part unknown, has been realized by the habitual processes of smuggling.” Brazil is the main source of these “carbonados,” black diamonds of great hardness and therefore value, used industrially.
The precious stones openly shipped from all Brazil during 1915 were worth only about one hundred and seventy-six contos of reis (say forty-four thousand dollars), of which about fifty-five per cent went to the United States and the rest to France. During 1916 the export of precious and semi-precious Brazilian stones to North America has been greatly stimulated by the access of luxury-purchasing which has coincided with the accumulation of war profits, and out of American purchases of jewels from abroad at the rate of a million dollars a week Brazil has her share. The stones of Brazil have long been appreciated in Europe—I am thinking of a certain shop in the Rue de la Paix in Paris and another at the top of Regent Street in London—and deserve to be better known in North America; the diamonds are beautiful, and their distribution among not only the wealthy but the “middle” classes in Brazil is so usual, the possession of good diamonds is so universally considered the right of every woman, that a gala night at the theatre in São Paulo or Rio is a display of brilliant stones which would put, for choice jewels, many capitals of the world to shame.
The lovely sea-blue agua-marinhas, with exquisite transparency and lustre, the soft green tourmalinas, the pink and golden topazes and purple amethysts are all found in great quantities in the Brazilian interior: many are native cut, and the wheel of the lapidary using beautiful coloured stones may be seen at work in Bello Horizonte, Rio, Bahia, and São Paulo.
If half that geologists have said of Brazil is true, this country is destined to become one of the greatest mining regions of the Americas; it has an extraordinary variety of minerals, but their location in the interior where little transportation exists, added to the restraining influences of archaic mining laws, has checked enterprise. Before the European War began plans were well under way for development of important iron mines in Minas Geraes by an English company, but work is in abeyance at present. There has been, however, a marked increase in exports of high-grade manganese, chiefly from Minas, chiefly shipped away in the newly operating line of freight steamers owned by the United States Steel Corporation, which bring manufactured products to Brazil. Out of the total of more than three hundred thousand tons of this ore exported from Brazil in 1915, over two hundred and sixty-six thousand tons were sent to the United States, the price paid being over two and a half million dollars; Great Britain also took ten thousand tons, but Germany and Belgium, former customers for this ore, were eliminated from the lists.
During 1916 production, mainly from Minas deposits, rose to over five hundred thousand tons, again increasing to five hundred and thirty-three thousand tons in 1917; after this time depression was experienced, due in great measure to lessened demands from the United States using home-produced low-grade ores for steel hardening. Post-war prospects of development of the great Itabira iron deposits suggest iron and steel industries within Brazil.
Large manganese deposits also occur in the neighbourhood of Nazareth, on the mainland side of the Bahia de Todos os Santos (Bahia State), situated conveniently for shipment; its export was reduced to practically nothing from this point during 1914 and 1915, probably for the same reason that shipments of another famous Brazilian mineral, monazite sand, vanished about the same time from Bahian lists. This reason was the imposition of strangulating export taxes, amounting to about twenty-two per cent of the value of the mineral. Manganese deposits are known to exist, in addition to the beds in Bahia and Minas, in Matto Grosso, Santa Catharina, Paraná and Amazonas; the total quantity available is estimated at one hundred million tons.
Monazite sands lie all along the southerly shores of Bahia, extending into Espirito Santo; their peculiar glow and lustre was first noticed by an Englishman, John Gordon, who had samples examined and found that they contained thorium, used in making incandescent gas mantles; he was in the shipping business in Brazil, and had no difficulty in thenceforth sending large quantities of the precious sands abroad, as ballast; the story goes that only by an accident was the fact revealed to the authorities that the sands were valuable above the ballast of most vessels, after some years. Duties were put on, and eventually exports slumped. The largest amount officially sent abroad in one year was 2,114 tons, 1908, with a value of 609 contos of reis. In 1915 only 439 tons were exported, all to the United States.
These three meagre items, precious stones, manganese and monazite sands, complete the 1915 official mining exports of a great mineral country. Probably increases will be shown for the year 1916, for, in addition to manganese increases, there has been great stimulation of coal mining in the States of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catharina and Paraná. More than one Brazilian railway, exasperated at the prices demanded for foreign coal, has been using native coal and helping in its production, and during the latter part of 1916 experimental shipments were made to the Argentine. Results are said to be good, but a little caution must be used before serious claims are made concerning the existence of very extensive deposits of fine hard steam coal. In any case the production of useful coal is a blessing to the east coast of South America, devoid as this region has been up to the present of any source of reliable carvão de pedra; every ton has been imported, chiefly from Wales but latterly from North America. Chile, on the other side of the Andes, has been mining coal for years, but the quality is not satisfactory for all purposes, and supplies have been supplemented from Australia in normal times.
Brazil has, it is known, important deposits of nickel, copper, lead, mica, platinum, wolfram, and many other minerals, but there has been no real attempt at operations, and until prospecting is systematically undertaken and money put into good equipment, Brazil cannot take her place as a great mineral producing country. She has the minerals, but she needs roads to get them out, and favourable laws to encourage mining development, as well as abolition of strangulating taxes. With intelligent assistance, Brazil’s manganese should be able at the close of the European War to compete with that of Russia, and her monazite with that of Travancore (India), aside from the other rich deposits.