Brazil today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

George Marcgraf and Wilhelm Piso are also Dutch names of note in connection with Brazil; the former studied Brazilian topography and water systems and wrote a treatise on the subject as well as the Historia Rerum Naturalium Brazilium; the latter was the first classifier of Brazilian flora and fauna. “We owe to him,” says Dr. Egas Moniz of Bahia, “the discovery of the emetic-cathartic properties of ipecacuanha and copaiba” as well as the therapeutic virtues of jaborandi and red mangue and several other drugs obtained from the Brazilian matto. The first scientific charting of the sertão behind Pernambuco, Alagôas and north Bahia was done during this time; herds of cattle already wandered over interior pastures, and settlers led by the independent spirit which renders the Brazilian indifferent to solitude had formed fazendas along river borders; explorers had wandered by these water paths looking for mines, but systematic maps and charts were lacking.

In 1640 Portugal revolted from Spain, regained her independence, and offered the crown to a member of the House of Braganza, a line which retained its inheritance until a few years ago. The effect upon the Americas was again notable; the Pernambucanos, still carrying on guerilla warfare from the forests, were heartened, obtained help from an enthusiastic Bahia, and redoubled their efforts; the Dutch came to an agreement with Portugal that all possessions conquered by them during the Spanish régime should be held, and tried to extend their holdings farther north—an effort which was vain in itself, costly in life and money, and hardened the determination of the colonists to do for themselves what the mother country would not do on their behalf. In 1643 Prince Maurice returned to Holland: he had the interests of the colony as such at heart too much to please the West India Company. A liberal minded man, he wished to see the colonial ports opened to free commerce, succeeded in getting the Company to forego all monopolies except that of taking dyewoods away from Brazil and sending in slaves and munitions of war, any Dutch captain being free to visit ports controlled by his compatriots; these were not agreeable pills for a monopolistic organization to swallow. On the other hand in recalling Maurice of Nassau the Company lost prestige, henceforward carried on a losing struggle with the virile Brazilians, and were forced out of section after section until by 1648 only the forts of Parahyba, Rio Grande do Norte, the island of Itamaracá and the city of Recife were in Dutch hands. A certain embarrassment was created in Europe by this situation, and the Portuguese Government, taken to task by Holland, sent emissaries to the insurgent Pernambucanos to order suspension of hostilities: the leaders replied that they “would go to receive punishment for their disobedience after they had turned the invaders out of Pernambuco,” and went on with the war. Holland herself, now at loggerheads with England or rather with Cromwell on account of her support given to the Stuarts, could not help her Brazilian colony; a severe defeat was inflicted by the Pernambucans in 1649, at the battle of Guararapes, and the Dutch, never recovering from this blow, were finally obliged to capitulate to Francisco Barretto in January, 1654. The Pernambucan attackers were nerved to this final effort, the storming of Recife, by the news of the disaster inflicted on van Tromp’s fleet in the English Channel at the hands of Blake.

Three months later the Dutch commander with all his troops left Brazil, and the only fragments remaining to the States General after a tremendous outlay of money and blood were a few islands in the West Indies and a piece of the Guiana country: small return for great effort. Portugal paid eight million florins to the Dutch in settlement of Brazilian differences and agreed to allow Holland free trade with the American colonies in all articles except the precious brazil-wood.

The chief results of Dutch occupation of the four capitanias of the north-eastern promontory for twenty-four years were, first, stimulation of world interest in this part of the vast Americas, for the sea-captains who carried Brazilian products for the first time into other parts of Europe than Portugal acted as advance agents of Brazilian commerce: second, scientific investigation into natural products and demonstration of the value of drugs peculiar to this part of South America: third, introduction of better town management systems: fourth, creation of a healthy national spirit in the northern provinces, with lasting effect upon character: and the quickening of colonization in the extreme north. It was not until the Dutch and French settled in Ceará and Maranhão and on the Amazon that serious efforts were made to develop these tropical territories under the equator; the year 1620 witnessed the first arrival of settlers of Portuguese nationality in Maranhão when two hundred families came from the Azores.

Another interesting and direct result of the Dutch intervention was the creation of the Companhia do Commercio do Brasil (Commercial Company of Brazil) by the Governor General, intended as a set-off to the Dutch West India Company. It was established in 1650, received monopolies and concessions of a valuable character, and in return was obliged to provide a powerful armed fleet to convoy merchant vessels through enemy-infested seas. The Commercial Company did as a fact render great services to the Brazilians fighting against the Dutch, blockading northern ports while insurgent armies attacked by land.

While the north was struggling with the Dutch and French and incidentally becoming solidified by the tussle until a genuine national feeling came into existence, Bahia, beating off attacks and remaining the administrative residence of a Captain-General, was the centre of the wealthiest part of the colony; all the slaves brought from Africa were sold here, and although they were partly distributed, this was the chief slave-owning region and is still the place where more pure negroes are to be seen than anywhere else in Brazil. Farther south Espirito Santo, one of the oldest of Brazilian colonies, was growing cane and raising cattle, but suffered from raiding foreigners, as also did Ilhéos; Rio de Janeiro became the seat of a second Captaincy-General in 1608, for a time, with command over S. Vicente and Espirito Santo but had no importance until the discovery of mines made her the chief gateway to the golden regions. Out of the path of the Dutch, whose object was wide agricultural lands, Rio neither suffered nor gained as did the North; at this part of the Brazilian coast the mountain barrier comes right down to the sea’s edge, the granite wall shouldering into the waters of the deeply indented bay: there is very little land suitable for plantations except in narrow valleys until the Serra do Mar is climbed. It was this lack of sugar land that kept Rio uncolonized, lovely as she is, for half a century after the colonies on either side of her were started; settlement by the Portuguese might have been put off still longer if the French under Admiral Villegaignon had not taken possession of the bay in 1555, made friends with the Tamoyo Indians as the Portuguese were never able to do, fortified a rocky island, and established a Huguenot colony here—the ill-fated “France Antarctique.” The energetic Mem de Sá, Captain-General after Thomé de Souza, brought a fleet from Bahia, drove the French into hiding on the mainland, sent his nephew, Estacio de Sá, to Portugal to get help, and this gallant young man returned with a strong force in 1565. In two years’ time, with troops from Bahia and São Paulo assisting, the unfortunate Huguenots were utterly defeated, the remnants of the exiles retiring into the woods with their Indian allies and disappearing from history. The body of Estacio de Sá, killed in the last decisive fighting, was buried in the shade of the Pão d’Assucar near the first Portuguese town founded in the bay and named São Sebastião. Another member of the same family, Correia de Sá, was sent to head the new Portuguese settlement, and eventually died there at the age of 113.

Division of Brazil into two captaincies-general in 1608, to be united again soon afterwards and again subsequently divided, was part of the experiments made by the European home governments, apparently with the sincere wish to develop the country; it was supposed that a region so vast could not be governed by one man, but as a matter of fact the occupied territory was along the seaboard on the whole, and communication by sea was fairly speedy; from 1549 onwards, when the first Captain-General was appointed, the mother country bought up when convenient the strips of land belonging to the heirs of the donatarios; some new captaincies were also added from time to time, as that of Grão Pará in 1616, Minas Geraes, Matto Grosso and Goyaz after the discovery of gold and diamonds, and an independent State of Maranhão, governed separately from the rest of Brazil was also created in 1621, thus adding to the governmental confusion in spite of good intentions. Decentralization was increased by the lack of commercial exchange between the different regions, and no successful effort improved this fault until the notable Marquis de Pombal took matters in hand in a statesmanlike manner in the latter half of the eighteenth century, buying the capitanias which were yet in private hands, creating Brazil a viceroyalty and Rio the viceregal capital.

But before that date much water had flowed under Brazilian bridges. It is not the purpose of this book to give in detail the history of Brazil, but to show the chief events and their effect upon development. Following the creation of the capitania system and its series of coastal settlements came the penetration of the southern interior by the Jesuits in their “reductions,” and the scattering of these centres of Indian population at the hands of the bandeirantes; the next happening of extreme importance for Brazil was the seizure of different parts of the coast by the Dutch and French, with their stimulating effect upon Portuguese colonization; it was after this that the gold rush to the interior of Minas, Goyaz and Matto Grosso populated and opened up the sertão in tiny patches, but at the same time half denuded the coast of its settlers and injured the agricultural production of the country, the prosperity of which was almost entirely owing to the introduction of negro slaves, another great factor in Brazilian progress.

Today the mining industry of Brazil accounts for a very small item on her exports lists, chiefly because the diamonds which go out are mostly contraband, the gold is produced by only two principal mines, and while there is a promising export of manganese it is insignificant compared to the big business of the country or to the possibilities contained in Brazil’s mineral seamed mountains. In the early eighteenth century Brazil was a famous gold country, and it is reckoned that over five hundred million dollars’ worth of this metal has been taken out. Nearly all this gold was found in placers easily washed out by hand in the crudest manner; when the rich alluvial deposits along river valleys were exhausted Brazil ceased to be a gold producer on a spectacular scale. In Minas Geraes rich sands were found near the present Ouro Preto, the first mining city that was founded bearing the name of Villa Rica; all about it the whole country is still in heaps, turned over by the miners who came a couple of hundred years ago. In that day people flocked into Minas, coming by road from S. Paulo, by the S. Francisco river from Bahia, and by a shorter cut over the mountain passes from Rio. The bones of many folk remained by the way: it is said that of one band of 300 Paulistas setting out in 1725 only five persons, two white men and three negroes, reached their objective, the far interior mines of Cuyabá. It became necessary for the authorities to forbid the taking of negroes to the mines, so general was the abandonment of plantations, but the protest of the Crown was only half-hearted; it was eminently satisfactory that a stream of gold and diamonds should flow across the Atlantic to Lisbon, and it was of as little use for governors to point out the bad economy of coastal depopulation in the seventeen hundreds as it had been for Governor Diogo de Menezes to write to the King in 1608: “Your Majesty may believe me that the true mines of Brazil are sugar and brazil-wood, whence your Majesty draws so much advantage without costing the Royal Treasury a single penny.”