Bees are by no means uncommon; they are easily domesticated, and, I believe, are perfectly harmless. Their honey is pleasant; the wax, particularly that generally sold, which is taken from their nests in old forest-trees, is very foul, but might be purified by a very simple process. The woods contain a great variety of animals of the monkey kind, and also beasts of prey, some of which have tolerably good fur. Among the latter may be classed a peculiar species of the otter. Insects are numerous, but the musquitos are not so offensively so as in the Rio de la Plata. The animalculum, called the niagua or jigger, is troublesome; it beds itself under the nails of the toes, and sometimes of the fingers, but it may easily be banished by extracting it and its bag of eggs with a needle, and filling the cavity with calomel or snuff, for fear any should have remained. Reptiles, I was told, were very numerous, but I saw few, except toads, which, in the evenings, crawl upon the foot-paths, and even infest the streets of the city. The sorocucu or jararaca (serpents) are said to be very dangerous.
The woods produce large and durable timber, well calculated for building. Of their trees, all of which retain their Indian names, some yield very fine gums. The jacarandá, called in England rose-wood, is here very common. Many of their shrubs bear beautiful flowers, and are very aromatic. Among the innumerable creeping plants which clothe the soil of their uncleared lands, there are some distinguished as infallible antidotes to the bite of venomous reptiles; one in particular, called the coração de Jesus[20], is universally esteemed.
Beyond the plain which nearly encircles S. Paulo, the country is hilly, or rather mountainous. Had the period of my stay been longer, I should have devoted some time to a geological tour in that district; but having urgent reasons to hasten my departure for Rio de Janeiro, I had leisure to make only one excursion of this kind. The governor invited me to visit the old gold-mines of Jaraguá, the first discovered in Brazil, which were now his property, together with a farm in their vicinity, distant about twenty-four miles from the city. We travelled along a tolerable, and in some places, fine road, in a southerly direction, for twelve miles, and crossed the Tieti. This river is here considerably larger and deeper than in the neighbourhood of S. Paulo; it has an excellent wooden bridge, free from toll. On its banks there are some situations truly enviable; fine rich virgin lands covered with timber, and capable of producing, not only the necessaries, but the luxuries of life, in a hundred-fold degree, if properly cultivated. It was melancholy to behold a territory, which, for its teeming soil and genial climate, deserves to be called a paradise, neglected and solitary, like that of Eden after the fall; while its infatuated possessors, like the offspring of Cain, hungering for gold, kept aloof from the rich feast which nature here spread before them.
After travelling onward four leagues, we arrived at the ancient mines of Jaraguá, famed for the immense treasures they produced nearly two centuries ago, when at the ports of Santos and S, Vicente, whence the gold was shipped for Europe, this district was regarded as the Peru of Brazil. The face of the country is uneven and rather mountainous. The rock, where it appeared exposed, I found to be granite, and sometimes gneiss, containing a portion of hornblende, with mica. The soil is red, and remarkably ferruginous, in many places apparently of great depth. The gold lies, for the most part, in a stratum of rounded pebbles and gravel, called cascalho, immediately incumbent on the solid rock. In the valleys, where there is water, occur frequent excavations, made by the gold-washers, to a considerable extent, some of them fifty or a hundred feet wide, and eighteen or twenty deep. On many of the hills, where water can be collected for washing, particles of gold are found in the soil, scarcely deeper than the roots of the grass.
The mode of working these mines, more fitly to be denominated washings, is simple, and may be easily explained:
Suppose a loose gravel-like stratum of rounded quartzose pebbles and adventitious matter, incumbent on granite, and covered by earthy matter of variable thickness. Where water of sufficiently high level can be commanded, the ground is cut in steps, each twenty or thirty feet wide, two or three broad, and about one deep. Near the bottom a trench is cut to the depth of two or three feet. On each step stand six or eight negroes, who, as the water flows gently from above, keep the earth continually in motion with shovels, until the whole is reduced to liquid mud and washed below. The particles of gold contained in this earth descend to the trench, where, by reason of their specific gravity, they quickly precipitate. Workmen are continually employed at the trench to remove the stones, and clear away the surface, which operation is much assisted by the current of water which falls into it. After five days’ washing, the precipitation in the trench is carried to some convenient stream, to undergo a second clearance. For this purpose wooden bowls are provided, of a funnel shape, about two feet wide at the mouth, and five or six inches deep, called gamellas. Each workman standing in the stream, takes into his bowl five or six pounds weight of the sediment, which generally consists of heavy matter, such as granular oxide of iron, pyrites, ferruginous quartz, &c. and often precious stones. They admit certain quantities of water into the bowls, which they move about so dexterously, that the precious metal, separating from the inferior and lighter substances, settles to the bottom and sides of the vessel. They then rinse their bowls in a larger vessel of clean water, leaving the gold in it, and begin again. The washing of each bowlful occupies from five to eight or nine minutes; the gold produced is extremely variable in quantity, and in the size of its particles, some of which are so minute, that they float, while others are found as large as peas, and not unfrequently much larger. This operation is superintended by overseers, as the result is of considerable importance. When the whole is finished, the gold is placed upon a brass pan, over a slow fire, to be dried, and at a convenient time is taken to the permutation office, where it is weighed, and a fifth is reserved for the Prince. The remainder is smelted with muriate of mercury, then cast into ingots, assayed, and stamped according to its intrinsic value, a certificate of which is given with it; after a copy of that instrument has been duly entered at the mint-office, the ingots circulate as specie.
My attention was strongly engaged by the immense debris or refuse of old washings, which lay in numberless heaps, and contained various substances that gave me strong hope of finding some interesting and valuable specimens of tourmalines, topazes, and other crystallizations, and also a rich series of rocks, which form the geognostics of the country. So strongly was I prepossessed with this hope, that I really fancied I had within my reach some of the finest mineral products of Brazil. Early one morning, before the sun became too hot for work, I set out accompanied by two or three men, with iron crows and hammers, whom I had engaged to assist me. We broke up immense quantities of quartzose and granite-like matter in various stages of decomposition, and others of a ferruginous kind, but after pursuing the operation for three whole days, until my hands could no longer wield the hammer, I was obliged to give up the search as fruitless; not a grain of gold did I find, nor anything of the nature of crystallization, except some miserable quartz, a little cubic and octahedral pyrites, and some very poor maganese! In short the substances presented so little novelty, and were in themselves so ordinary, that I hesitated whether I should carry them with me to S. Paulo. This disappointment at the first gold mines I had seen, not a little dejected me.
In company with the Governor and his lady, I now took a survey of the farm; we walked and rode through extensive plantations, the productions of which, as well as the mode of culture pursued, were similar to those I have already described. Our next recreation was hunting the deer. Let not the reader imagine that I am going to lead him a chase through miles of country with a pack of hounds and a joyous company of horsemen; the mode of hunting in Brazil affords no such diversion. Three or four men go out armed with guns and attended by two or three dogs; the men separate and wait in some open place; meanwhile the dogs quest among the plantations and thickets; if they find, they drive the game out, which the hunters immediately shoot. The deer are small, and of the fallow kind; but their flesh is not esteemed.
The wild animals of this district are chiefly monkeys, sloths, a variety of the porcupine, and opossums. These, and other predatory beasts, make great havoc among the poultry. Of the feathered tribe there are not many varieties; I shot several snipes and beautiful lapwings[21] with red horns on each pinion, about half an inch in length. Here are great numbers of parrots and parroquets.