PLANTATION RAILWAY
SANTOS-DUMONT COFFEE PLANTATION IN BRAZIL
Inhabitants of Europe comically figure those Brazilian plantations to themselves as primitive stations of the boundless pampas, as innocent of the cart and the wheelbarrow as of the electric light and the telephone. There are such stations far in the interior. I have been through them on hunting trips, but they are not the coffee plantations of Sao-Paulo.
I can hardly imagine a more stimulating environment for a boy dreaming over mechanical inventions. At the age of seven I was permitted to drive our "locomobiles" of the epoch—steam traction-engines of the fields with great broad wheels. At the age of twelve I had conquered my place in the cabs of the Baldwin locomotive engines hauling train-loads of green coffee over the sixty miles of our plantation railway. When my father and brothers would take pleasure in making horseback trips far and near, to see if the trees were clean, if the crops were coming up, if the rains had done damage, I preferred to slip down to the Works and play with the coffee-engines.
I think it is not generally understood how scientifically a Brazilian coffee plantation may be operated. From the moment when a railway train has brought the green berries to the Works to the moment when the finished and assorted product is loaded on the transatlantic ships, no human hand touches the coffee.
You know that the berries of black coffee are red when they are green. Though it may complicate the statement, they look like cherries. Car loads of them are unloaded at the central works and thrown into great tanks, where the water is continually renewed and agitated. Mud that has clung to the berries from the rains, and little stones which have got mixed up with them in the loading of the cars, go to the bottom, while the berries and the little sticks and bits of leaves float on the surface and are carried from the tank by means of an inclined trough, whose bottom is pierced with innumerable little holes. Through these holes falls some of the water with the berries, while the little sticks and pieces of leaves float on.
The Works
"Locomobile"
THE SANTOS-DUMONT COFFEE PLANTATION IN BRAZIL
The fallen coffee berries are now clean. They are still red, about the size and look of cherries. The red exterior is a hard pod or polpa. Inside of each pod are two beans, each of which is covered with a skin of its own. The water which has fallen with the berries carries them on to the machine called the despolpador, which breaks the outside pod and frees the beans. Long tubes, called "dryers," now receive the beans, still wet, and with their skins still on them. In these dryers the beans are continually agitated in hot air.