From Rio it is possible also to go by railroad to Bello Horizonte, the remarkable capital of Minas Geraes, the most densely populated of all the Brazilian States. This city is unique in that it did not have its beginning in the usual way and get itself chosen as the capital; it was built only a few years ago on a previously unoccupied site for the very purpose, and at a cost, for only the buildings owned by the government, of more than $30,000,000. It is located in a lovely, wooded, farm-dotted valley, through the length of which flows a river, interrupted at intervals by cascades. Near the city, both sides of the stream have been converted into a delightful park. One of the avenues that run through the center of the city is named for its founder, Affonso Penna, and is a hundred and fifty feet wide and shaded by three rows of trees. The hotels are comfortable, train service good, and the journey through a country of beautiful scenery and interesting people and towns.
This is the great mining State of Brazil. Of it Marie Robinson Wright says: “Few countries can boast of such an abundance and variety of mineral resources as Minas Geraes, which derives its name, signifying General Mines, from the industry that gave it existence, and which owes to this principal attraction the preponderance of its population.” Gold was not discovered during the first two hundred years after settlement had been begun by the Portuguese, but, when it was at last discovered, the yield was very great. In 1792 the amount registered in Rio—and this record, of course, was incomplete—was 360,000 pounds in weight. An English authority has estimated the total output up to within recent years at £200,000,000 sterling. “Of all the fabulous tales related of bonanza princes,” Mrs. Wright goes on to say, “the palm for extravagance belongs to the history of the early mining days in Brazil, when horses were shod with gold, when lawyers supported their pleadings before judges with gifts of what appeared at first sight to be the choicest oranges and bananas, but proved to be solid gold imitations, when guests were entertained at dinner by the discovery of gold pebbles in their soup instead of grains of corn, when nuggets were the most convenient means of exchange in the money market;” but here, as in some of our own mining regions, with the gradual exhaustion of the surface deposits and the impossibility of continuing by primitive methods, mining came to be more and more neglected. Modern methods and machinery are once more bringing the industry into prominence, and a considerable amount of gold is even now being taken out by the few companies that have already installed up-to-date plants.
The diamond mines in the neighborhood of the old town of Diamantina (also easily accessible by rail) have been famous since the first discoveries were made in 1727. In these parts several of the most valuable gems in the world are said to have been found—for instance, the Braganza, the richest of the Crown jewels of Portugal, the Regent, named in honor of Dom João VI, the Estrella do Sul (Star of the South), that weighed a hundred and twenty-five carats after lapidation and was purchased by the Rajah of Baroda, it is said, for $15,000,000, and the Dresden, which weighed sixty-five carats after lapidation and was also bought by an Indian prince. For many years, until the South African mines came into competition, this was the chief source of the world’s supply. The country is also rich in amethysts, tourmalines, topazes and aquamarines. The State of Bahia is still the principal source of the black diamond, known as the carbonado. The largest carbonado known was found there in 1835. It weighed 3150 carats.
III
ARGENTINA
I
No nation of the southern continent is better qualified than Argentina to rebuke the stupid jest that refers to the Latin-American countries as opera bouffe republics. It has a domain one-third the size of the United States, or as large as the territory lying east of the Mississippi, with Texas added, stretching from tropic heat to antarctic cold, and possessing a frontage on the Atlantic as extensive as our own coast line from Portland, Maine, to Key West, Florida. It has over 500,000,000 acres of its 1,135,840 square miles of area available for the cultivation of life-sustaining products and distributed over vast, treeless, well-watered plains, every one of which is easily accessible to the seaboard with the simplest of railway construction. These plains have no such natural obstructions to transportation as our Alleghanies or Rockies, and have for their produce a much shorter haul to the European world of consumers.
Argentina has the further advantage of over 18,000 miles of up-to-date railways radiating from its port cities, and five river systems, one of which, La Plata, the outlet for the waters of the Paraná and Uruguay, is second only to the Amazon among the world’s great rivers. It is 180 miles wide at its mouth, and pours into the Atlantic a flood greater by eighty per cent. than that cast by the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico.
The timber regions of the country are rich in structural and cabinet woods. It has a grazing industry that ranks second only to Australia in sheep, second only to the United States in cattle, and second only to the United States and Russia in horses. In 1910 it exported to Europe 190,430 live animals and $130,000,000 worth of frozen beef, mutton, pork, hides, and other animal products. Its total foreign commerce amounted to $702,664,810 in value. It has an agricultural output that places it in the first rank of exporters of maize and linseed, second to Russia in the export of wheat, and among the leaders in corn, a soil that can grow still greater quantities of sugar, tobacco, rice, alfalfa, grapes, fruits, yerba maté (Paraguay tea), olives, corn, barley, and oats, besides medicinal, textile, and tinctorial plants, enabling her to export more foodstuffs, including meats and grains, than any other nation on the globe—a productiveness so great that farms are measured in some sections by the square league, instead of by the paltry acre, as with us, and grains are sold by the metric ton of 2205 pounds, instead of by the bushel. Its mountains contain profitably workable deposits of gold, silver, and copper, and oil has been found in paying quantities.
It has a metropolis and seaport (its capital, Buenos Aires) reckoned as the second Latin city in the world, possessing a population of over a million and a quarter, and adorned with buildings, parks, surface improvements, and evidences of wealth and culture that stamp it as one of the finest cities of the Western Hemisphere.