Brazil and La Plata: The personal record of a cruise

by C. S. Stewart

While the establishment of a home for the friendless young is one of the most self-commending of charities, the philanthropy which provides an asylum for the secret reception of foundlings is no longer questionable, in the judgment of the wisely benevolent and truly good. It is but to foster vice, and to encourage the unnatural and depraved in the abandonment of their offspring. This is well known here, and readily admitted to be the effect. The number yearly left in the roda, or turning-box, of this hospital, amounts, I am told, by those best informed, to five and six hundred—white, black and mongrel of every degree. More than half of these soon perish from diseases seated upon them before being abandoned; from the impossibility of securing natural nourishment for the feeble; and from the various ills to which early infancy under the most favored auspices is subject.

December 20th.—One source of agreeable excitement with us, is the daily anticipation and frequent arrival of sailing vessels and steamers, governmental and mercantile, from the United States and various parts of the world. The number of vessels entering the port of Rio annually, besides those engaged in the coasting trade, which are very numerous, averages about eight hundred: importing cargoes to the amount of some two hundred thousand tons. Of course, scarcely a day passes without the entry of two or three foreign vessels in the regular trade, besides such as merely touch for repairs or refreshment.

It is a remarkable fact—especially in view of the achievements in navigation, of the Portuguese of old, and the boldness and enterprise with which for centuries they sustained their part in the commerce of the world—that their descendants here should have yielded that of the empire, which is foreign, entirely to the vessels of other nations. It is extremely rare for a Brazilian ship to cross the Atlantic, or double Cape Horn, or the Cape of Good Hope; and I learn, from Gov. Kent, that not a single vessel of the country has cleared for the United States, since he has been consul here. Their trading vessels, though small, are generally well built, strong, and well modelled; and are navigated with care and safety along the extended coasts of the continent, from the Plata to the Amazon. But, as the consul remarks, “the native navigators seem afraid to compete on the high seas, with the vessels of this age of hurry and locomotion—with the reckless driving of the ‘Flying Clouds’ and ‘White Squalls,’ the ‘Sea Witches,’ and other wild birds of the ocean, and yield, without a struggle, the enterprises in foreign commerce to the hardy northmen—the unwearied and ever-present Yankee, and the pushing and exacting Englishman.” The truth is, as he adds, the Brazilian is not by nature a trader or experimenter. He thinks it sufficient for him to raise coffee and get it to a market: he lacks the energy, the industry—the earnest, long-continued, unwearied effort which leads one willingly to sacrifice present ease, comfort, and quiet, to the prospect of future gain, and which makes the successful merchant. “Go ahead,” “strive,” “struggle,” “compete”—are words not belonging to his vocabulary. He shrugs his shoulders at the very mention of them—not in contempt, but in despair; and prefers sitting in his easy chair, or lolling out of the window, to the tussle of life common with us, of which the very thought would throw him into a perspiration. “Let the negroes work,” is his motto; “and let what they cannot do remain undone.” The Yankee character, as exhibited here within the year or two past, in the rush by of the thousands of emigrants on their way to California, struck the people with astonishment. They were looked upon as most reckless and daring adventurers, who, born in snow-drifts and cradled in ice, had a hardihood and enterprise it was in vain to attempt to rival. But I am forgetting the subject with which I commenced.

The telegraphic station on Castle Hill, to and from which the appearance of all sail in the offing is reported, is in full view from our moorings. The quarter-masters of the Congress are furnished with explanations of the various flags used, and the combinations by which the nation, character, and position of the sail in sight are made known. Few moments of the day pass without a turn of the glass in that direction. The distinguishing flag for an American vessel is a long, pointed pennant of white and deep blue in closely-arranged perpendicular stripes, giving to it the appearance, as it flutters in the wind, of being ring-streaked. With a Yankee fondness for sobriquets having a political or national import, Jack has dubbed this pennant “the coon’s tail,” from a fancied resemblance to the well-known emblem of the party of which the great statesman of Kentucky was so long an illustrious leader; and, “the coon’s tail is up!” or “there goes the coon’s tail!” is the regular announcement of an American ship in the offing.

Among uncounted merchant vessels which have thus been reported since our return from the Plata, there have also been the frigate Raritan, storeship Relief, and sloops-of-war Saratoga and St. Mary of the navy. The St. Mary was especially welcome from the number of officers attached to her, closely associated in friendship with several on board the Congress. Captain Magruder, her commander, is of this number; and is justly held in high estimation. The intercourse on his part with our ship has been most intimate. After an interchange of civilities by various parties on board both vessels, Captain McIntosh and I took dinner informally with him to-day, with the purpose of a drive afterwards to the Botanic Gardens. These lie six or eight miles south-west from the city, on the sea-shore, beneath the range of mountains, of which the Corcovado and the Gavia are such conspicuous points. For three miles the way is the same described in a visit to Botafogo. The remainder does not differ materially from it, except that the suburbs of the place change gradually, by the greater distances intervening between the villas and country houses which adorn the sides of the road, into a thinly-occupied and open country. At the distance of five miles, the interval between the mountains and the sea is taken up chiefly by a lake or lagoon called Rodrigo de Freitas. A short drive hence over a sandy plain brought us to the gates of the garden. This was originally a pleasure-ground of the royal family in the time of John VI., and was appropriated by him to its present use, on the accidental arrival in 1809 of various cases of exotics from the Isle of France, in a vessel which brought to Rio a company of Portuguese prisoners. The collection was afterwards augmented, at the order of the king, by additions from Cayenne, then under his rule; and eventually by the importation of the tea-plant from China, with a company of Chinese laborers skilled in its cultivation and in the preparation of the leaf for use. The attempt proved a failure; not so much from a want of adaptation in the soil and climate, or from the quality of the tea produced, as from the expense above the cost of the imported article. Both here, and at Santa Cruz—an imperial estate fifty miles west of Rio, where also a plantation was formed—the culture has been abandoned; a few plats of stunted, mildewed, and neglected bushes only are left as a botanical curiosity.

The gardens cover some fifty acres of ground—an alluvial flat of rich soil, and constitute a nursery from which plants of the cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, camphor, allspice, and tea, originally introduced here, have been widely dispersed through the empire. Specimens of all these were examined by us.

The cinnamon and camphor trees are of the laurel family—the laurus cinnamonum and laurus camphora;—the nutmeg, clove, and allspice, of the myrtle. The cinnamon grows to a height of fifteen or twenty feet. The stem and branches are of a light green; the leaves, of the shape of the laurel, are also light green, and are pliant and tender. When they first bud forth they are of a light red, and gradually become green as they advance in growth. The blossoms are white. There is no perceptible fragrance, either in the stem or leaf, till bruised or broken, but both when bitten have the cinnamon flavor. The clove is the flower-bud of the caryophyllus aromaticus. The tree was in blossom and the bud very strong in its peculiar taste. Specimens of all these in branch, blossom, and fruit, were readily furnished by a negro in attendance, who expected a trifling gratuity in return.

Long avenues of the Sumatra nut—vernicia montana—furnish abundant shade, and yield great quantities of nuts. The mulberry tree is also introduced for the purpose of shade. The bread-fruit—artocarpus incisa—so familiar to me in the South Seas, was also conspicuous in the beauty of its strongly-marked, shining, and digitated foliage, and its ponderous fruit of light green.

The whole garden, though a national property, for the good keeping of which an annual appropriation is made by the imperial legislature, appeared in a neglected state. There is nothing strikingly tasteful or artistic in the arrangement or embellishment of the ground. At the western end, a mountain stream comes brawling down a rocky channel, and on reaching the level, meanders lazily eastward, between banks beautifully fringed with bamboo, and overhung by the dense foliage of loftier growth. Where this mountain stream enters, there is an attempt, on a small scale, at landscape gardening. A little basin of water with projecting points, and an islet or two, overhung by willows, represents a miniature lake; and near by, on an artificial and terraced mound, is a chapel-like summer house, formed of the flat cedar or arbor vitæ, so planted and so trained as to be perfectly architectural in its outline, and to appear to be an old ruin overrun with living green. That, however, which more than any other ornamental feature of the place attracted our notice, was an avenue of royal palms, a quarter of a mile and more in length, leading in a straight line from the principal gate, and crossed at right angles, midway of the distance, by another corresponding with it. The trees are at perfectly regular distances from each other; are all of one size, and, either by nature or by artificial training, rise from uniformly shaped swelling bases, into perpendicular shafts, forty or fifty feet in height. The silver-gray trunks, marked in their whole length by rings, showing the growth of each year, terminate in plumed capitals of true Corinthian magnificence. The effect of the perspective is very beautiful: strikingly like that which we would imagine a colonnade of equal length in Egyptian or Asiatic architecture to be.

As a botanical garden, the place is unworthy the name, and useless as such to the cause of science. The realization of one here, such as John VI. projected, would be exceedingly interesting and important. There is no empire in the world in which a botanical garden on a magnificent scale could be more readily established, or whose native vegetable kingdom is so rich, and so full of novelties to the scientific world.