Brazil is, of course, not a Spanish American country, although it was at one period under the dominion of Spain; and it stands apart from the remainder of the great sisterhood of the Latin American Republics by reason of its Portuguese origin and language, although the common Iberian ancestry renders it similar thereto in other respects. It differs, furthermore, in the constitution of its people, in that the African negro race has been so considerably absorbed into the twenty-two million souls which form the population of the Republic: an admixture which is of considerable ethnological interest, and may have some important bearing on the future relation of the white and coloured races of the world.
THE BAY OF RIO DE JANEIRO.
Vol. II. To face p. 112.
The magnificent but somewhat incoherent land as is Brazil to-day, offered at the time of its discovery few attractions to the sovereigns of a Mother Country into whose coffers the wealth of Africa and of India flowed. Its poor and barbarous tribes had no stores of gold ready to the hand of the Conquistador; there was no civilized empire with a polity and architecture and organized social life, with armies to protect it, such as Mexico and Peru offered, and consequently neither glory nor riches urged the European discoverer or invader to tempt its hinterland and people its valleys and seaboard. For thirty years the Portuguese sovereigns paid little heed to this newly acquired dominion, except that they fought off the encroaching Spaniard and the adventurers of France, who would have entered or traded with it.
Twenty years before the Conquest of Mexico it was that the first explorer sailed the Brazilian coast—and only eight years after Columbus had sighted the American mainland—that the Spaniard, Vicente Yañez Pinzon, a companion of Columbus, with whom sailed Amerigo Vespucci—who gave his name to America—sighted the shore of what is now Brazil, near Cape San Augustine, reconnoitring the mouth of the Amazon and coasting along to the Orinoco. He took away some gems from the Indians, some drugs and a load of dye-wood.
From this later commodity of the dye-wood, the great dominion of Brazil took its name. "Brazil" was originally a legendary island in the Atlantic, which long retained its imaginary position in the lore of the forecastle and upon the ancient charts, and from this circumstance the name came to be bestowed upon that enormous part of South America which produced the red dye-woods similar to those which bore the name of Brazil in the Middle Ages.
A few months after the keel of Pinzon had furrowed these unknown seas, another explorer, Cabral, close upon Easter in 1499 (O.S.), following the course of Vasco de Gama to the east, was drifted by an adverse gale so far from his proper track that he reached this same coast, and, anchoring in Porto Seguro, erected an altar there, celebrated Mass, set up a stone cross and took possession of the country for the King of Portugal. He, like Columbus, thought he had reached India, and sent a vessel to Lisbon with the news.
Let us turn for a space to examine the great land thus brought to knowledge by these early voyagers.
To-day, the traveller in Brazil will soon be impressed by the immensity of its spaces, will remark how broad are these wide tablelands, how interminable the serras and mountain ranges, how boundless the forests. The territory of this great land is fifteen times that of France. It is larger than the United States (without Alaska); it is over 2,600 miles long upon the Atlantic, and 2,700 miles wide from its coast to where, across the heart of the continent, it touches the frontier of Peru. Its boundaries touch those of every South American nation except Chile. Persistent trespassers were the Portuguese in the early Colonial period, and their land-hunger carried them beyond those boundaries which the Pope, as we have seen in a former chapter, fixed between Portugal and Spain.