Parahyba was founded in 1585 by Martín Leitão—his name, by the way, means suckling pig—eighteen miles from the mouth of the river of the same name. This region was once abundant in the pau brazil for which the country was named, but to-day its principal product is cotton, bales of which were exchanging places with barrels of Minneapolis flour in the freight-cars behind the station. Most of the town’s estimated 30,000 inhabitants appeared to be loafing government employees. They were a melancholy lot, on the whole, to whom life was evidently as joyless as to the Puritan, crushed under the weight of existence and always struggling to repress the desire to live gladly. “These tropical people,” said a Dane who had lived long among them, “have none of the joy of living, none of the chest-expansion of pleasure at confronting life which is common to northern peoples. Such enjoyment as they have is made up almost exclusively of the constant stimulating of the sexual instinct. They have no feeling for what we people of the North call a “home,” and never really found one. They have a wildly romantic idea of marriage, which means to them nothing but physical gratification, and, their sensual instincts satisfied, they continue to live together merely out of custom, following the line of least resistance. There is not a man in town, from president to porter, who does not keep at least one other woman besides his wife, if he can by hook or crook afford it.”
The pungent odor of crude sugar is characteristic of downtown Recife
In the dry states north of Pernambuco cotton is the most important crop
Walking up a cocoanut palm to get a cool drink
Wherever a Brazilian train halts long enough the passengers rush out to have a cup of coffee
“Whatever the economic condition of the colony,” boasts the History of Parahyba, “it never failed to bequeath plenty of churches to posterity.” The town terminates in a bulking old religious edifice, and is generously supplied with others throughout its length. Of breadth it has little, for it falls quickly away on either side of its ridge into cacao groves or vast reaches of bluish swamp-like bushes, half covered at high tide. The dead hot streets of noonday were like those of an abandoned city; stepping from the sunshine into the shade was like dropping an enormous weight off one’s head and shoulders. Most of the thirty thousand live in mud huts with palm-leaf roofs and doors, the earth for floor, and the omnipresent hammock for chair, bed, and favorite occupation. The central praça has a hint of grass, by great effort and much carrying of water, and glorious royal palms stand high above it. But beautiful as it is, the royal palm does not take high rank as a shade tree. Elsewhere the streets, like Kipling’s railroad, soon run out to sand-heaps. An hour’s swift walk from the new power-house at the end of the made-in-Germany tram line brings one, through hot sandy jungle, heavily wooded in places, to the open sea, where the well-to-do Parahybanos go in “summer” by a little railroad that did not operate in this wintry season. Small steamers can reach Parahyba at high tide, though few ever do so. Its port is Cabedello at the mouth of the river, the fortress of which, like most of Brazil north of Rio, fell several times into the hands of Holland, the name of the town being once changed by Maurice of Nassau to “Margarida” in honor of his mother.