Luckily I had already weathered the first shock of the traveler who comes rudely in contact with the Brazilian money system, but I paid miser-faced old madame in a daze, and retired to a quiet corner to figure up the exact extent of the disaster that had befallen me. On due reflection it proved to be not quite so overwhelming as it had sounded. Even when they are reduced to real money Brazilian prices are not mild, but they are by no means so utterly insane as they sound. The monetary unit is the real, in theory only, for no such coin exists, and in practice only the plural reis is used, the real unit being the milreis, one thousand reis. For years the milreis had remained at the fixed value of fifteen to the English pound. In larger transactions—and most transactions are large in Brazil—the unit is the conto, one million reis, about $325. Gold is never seen in circulation. Between the milreis and the conto there are paper notes, usually printed in New York; silver coins from five hundred to two thousand reis, and nickel pieces of four, two, and one hundred complete the list in common circulation. Lastly, lest the unwarned stranger be led astray by appearances, the Brazilian places his dollar sign after the milreis and before the reis, so that 3$250 means the normal equivalent of an American dollar, and the man who pays $500 for a newspaper or a small glass of iced cane-juice does not feel that he has been unusually extravagant—at least if he has lived long enough in Brazil to get the local point of view.
A pair of German peasants sat in a corner of the second-class coach when we pulled out of Santa Maria. Theirs were the same honest, wrinkled, hard-working, unimaginative faces one sees in rural Germany. The woman, with a kerchief over her head and her bare feet thrust into low slippers, was as devoid of feminine coquettishness as of desire for adornment, a picture of the plodding, toilsome helpmate of the thoroughly Teuton farmer at her side. Yet I found that they had never been outside the southernmost state of Brazil, though they spoke German with far more ease than they did Portuguese, and their appearance would not have attracted the slightest attention in the very heart of Germany.
The three fertile southern states of Brazil are on an elevated plateau that makes them excellent cereal and fruit regions well suited as a permanent habitation of the white race. All that portion of Brazil below Rio de Janeiro is of comparatively recent settlement. During the colonial period Portuguese energy was directed almost exclusively to the semi-tropical and tropical regions of the north, to Bahia and Pernambuco, where rich tobacco and sugar plantations could be worked with slave labor, or to the gold and diamond lands of the interior, with their special attractions to impatient fortune hunters. The splendid pasture lands of the temperate zone were scorned by these eager adventurers; maps printed as late as 1865 bear across all these southern provinces the words “unknown and inhabited by wild Indians.”
The Germans, to be sure, had begun to appear before that. Barely had the exiled emperor of Portugal settled down in 1808, to rule his immense overseas domain when he set about filling in its waste spaces by an immigration policy that is to this day continued by the states themselves. Not only Dom João but his successors, the two Dom Pedros, turned to Switzerland and Germany for the hardy settlers needed to tame this south-temperate wilderness. The first official German colony in Brazil was founded in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and for twenty-five years Teutonic settlers were established at many different points, chiefly in the three southernmost states, in some cases as far north as Minas Geraes. But in 1859 the German government forbade emigration to Brazil. The original settlers are therefore long since dead and the present inhabitants are of the third or fourth generation, born in Brazil, and with little more than a traditional feeling for the Fatherland. Yet it is a peculiarity of South American civilization that it does not impose itself upon European immigration to any such degree as does that of the United States. Ask the man whose father, or even grandfather, emigrated from Germany to Brazil what his nationality is and he is almost certain to reply, without any consciousness of the strangeness of his answer, “Ich bin Deutsch.” If the German has remained a German in Brazil, it is perhaps as much the fault of the Brazilian environment as by his own choice. There are cities in the southern states of Brazil so German that men and women born in them speak not a word of Portuguese. This is particularly frequent in the district about Porto Alegre and in the “lagoon country” between there and the Uruguayan boundary. Joinville, in Santa Catharina, named for a German prince who married the daughter of an emperor of Brazil, is so German that the Portuguese tongue attracts attention in the streets, as it does in several other of the thirteen colonies founded before the ban was placed on German emigration. Even the inhabitants who speak Portuguese do so with difficulty and with a strong Teutonic accent. The school teachers of these former colonies are subsidized German pastors; the German element is so strong as often to elect a German state president—the states of Brazil have presidents rather than governors. For several years all office holders in Santa Catharina, with the exception of the Federal Court, appointed in Rio, were Germans, and the anomaly of Brazilian government reports written by men who scarcely knew the language of the country in which they ruled was by no means unusual.
It is estimated that there are now about a million descendants of Germans in the three or four southern states of Brazil, a territory approximately as large as our “solid south” east of the Mississippi. Their adopted country was liberal to the early settlers, allotting 175 acres of land to each immigrant, though this has been much reduced in individual cases by speculative abuses. Not until 1896 was the German edict against migration to Brazil removed, and by that time the southern states had attracted new settlers, particularly from Italy. The state of São Paulo, for instance, has built up her great coffee industry and factory production chiefly on Italian immigration. The Germans are said always to seek the lower lands and the river bottoms, raising especially pigs and vegetables, while the Italians plant the high ridges farther back from the sea with corn and grapes, with the result that such towns as Garabaldi and Novo Hamburgo, Blumenau and Angelina, are but a cannon-shot apart.
Where the great Lagoa dos Patos opens to the sea at the town of Rio Grande, on sandy, onion-growing flats that follow two hundred miles of shifting sand dunes from Imbituba southward, is a hot, often sand-beaten point once ruled by powerful British firms. It is nearly a hundred miles up this “inland sea” to the capital of the state, with 200,000 inhabitants, which with the large town of Pelotas is the great port of embarkation of the xarque, as the tasajo, or thick dried beef, of the Argentine is called in Brazil. One by one the German traders crowded out their competitors in this region; with the docile population of the “lagoon cities” racially friendly to them they established a virtual German monopoly of German commercial and financial houses in coöperation with German shipping. Where the German ruled there was no room for any other European or American, not even for Brazilian industry, and in each of these coastal cities of southern Brazil a great German firm was supreme dictator before the World War, which was not the least of the many causes of that war. What advantages these uncrowned rulers of their million unsophisticated and often unconscious subjects might have taken in establishing themselves and their Fatherland more firmly in Brazil if the world conflict had ended differently is of course now a purely academic question.
The lines of southern Brazil could scarcely be made a real railroad in the American sense without complete rebuilding, for they constantly squirm and twist and wind their way over the lightly rolling country, seeking always the higher levels and never by any chance running for a yard straight forward. One of the trainmen asserted that if a cow got in the way of the surveyors who laid out the line, they moved the transit rather than exert themselves to go and drive her away. Less facetious officials explained that the engines are so weak that anything steeper than a one per cent. grade was avoided in the building, and that this was done on contract by Brazilians and by the mile. From the car-windows we had frequent views of the engineer and the fireman in their cab; we darted from side to side so often that, it would have been easy to imagine the little engine in terror of the many wide-horned cattle scattered over the rolling landscape. The brakes were frequently called upon to keep us from running over the time-table; stations or crossings were so rare that the whistle was uncomfortably startling; at the rare places where we did officially stop an extended argument usually arose between the station master in his red cap and the trainmen in their blue ones as to when it would be fitting and advisable to jolt onward.
Beyond the large town of Passo Fundo appeared, first singly, then in roomy clusters, the splendid pinheiro araucarai, the slender yet sturdy Brazilian pine-tree, erect and entirely free from branches to the very top, from which these suddenly spread thickly out at right angles to the trunk. The parasol-pine makes excellent lumber, being lighter yet stronger than our northern pine, but above all it beautifies the landscape. The rare small clumps of it in the hollows became more and more numerous until, at Erechim, we found ourselves in an entire forest of parasol-pines, with an atmosphere strikingly like our northern lumber woods. The weather had grown so warm that in the middle of the day it was uncomfortable to sit in the unshaded car window, and creepers and lianas were beginning to appear in the semi-tropical forests, silent but for the song of the tree-toad.
I descended at the station of Erebango to spend the “Fourth” with a fellow-countryman in charge of the construction of a branch railway through the Jewish “Colonia Quatro Irmãos.” At the station was gathered a group of Semitic immigrants just arrived from Europe, still in the same heavy garb and wool caps in which they had left their wintry home. We boarded the constructor’s “motor gallego,” a hand-car pumped by four lusty Galicians, and struck out in company with the Jewish manager of the colony. Each Jew was given upon arrival a piece of land and some stock, the latter to be paid for after he got his start. For an hour we pumped our way through semi-tropical forest, here and there broken by clearings scattered with light-colored wooden houses, to come out upon a more open rolling country suggestive of Uruguay but with clumps of the beautiful parasol-pine in the hollows. Then I was furnished a horse and rode away over the ridges, visiting a score of Jewish families. It being Saturday, they were dressed in their Sabbath best, some of them, who had lived in the United States, as overdressed as Irish “hired girls” going to mass. Men, women, and children were gathered in large groups drinking schnaps, and several of the men, in low-crowned derbies, grew confidential and told me they wished they were back in “Heshter Schtreet.” I spoke German to their Yiddish, as I did Spanish to my peon’s Portuguese, and not only carried on conversation easily but several times acted as interpreter. The little unpainted houses were tolerably clean, with cheap lace curtains; and schoolhouses were being built. But though some of them had been here for months, there was little evidence of any work being done by the colonists themselves. One got the impression that they preferred to live on the charity of the association and its wealthy European sponsors rather than indulge in physical exertion under the semi-tropical sun, and one wondered if it was possible to make a farmer out of the Jew, whether the colonists were not merely waiting for a town to grow up, that they might go and sell things to one another. The railway company of southern Brazil, which is British-American, as well as the Brazilian Government, is favoring such immigration, but a casual glimpse of the colony did not suggest that this was the best means of bringing the fertile waste places of the republic into productive activity.
The tri-weekly train picked me up two days later, the privacy of my narrow-gauge dormitorio being again unbroken. Hour after hour we rambled on in leisurely tropical fashion. The water tanks were not at the stations but wherever streams gave a supply, thereby increasing the number of stops. Once a horse got on the track and ran for seven miles ahead of the tooting little engine, refusing to leave the rails even when the fireman got off and threw imported coal at it while the train crept on after him. To have run into the animal would probably have spilled our toy locomotive down the embankment of red earth. Finally a group of Polish men and women gathered on the track ahead and forced the weary beast to take to the matta, the jungled wilderness that shut us in. At another stop the station-master, a pale blond who spoke German but who sold tickets like a Latin-American, would not give the engineer the signal to start until he had sent a boy to drive his ducks out from under the engine where they were lolling in the shade. The number of curs prowling about the stations made it easy to believe a joker’s assertion that the dogs know the train schedule and line up along the track in proper time and place for their tri-weekly banquet from the dining-car. Here was the most costly part of the line, built by American engineers, many bridges and viaducts lifting it across deep wooded gullies with wonderful vistas of tree-tops, the dark green of the pinheiro still predominating in the sky-line.