CHAPTER II
COLONIZATION IN BRAZIL
The story of colonization in Brazil is unique in the annals of the human movement across the world that has been going on ever since man began to multiply and to seek elbow-room; it is one of the phenomena of exodus.
Arrival upon the shores of Brazil of an extraordinary variety of races was not a voluntary immigration in most instances. It was the result of a studied policy, inaugurated by the Emperors of Brazil, and carried on to the present day by the Federal Government and certain of the separate States; experiments in various kinds of people were made on a concerted plan, the colonies were grouped, in many cases isolated, retained their language and customs, still produce the food to which they were accustomed in the home land, and only become assimilated as their populations leave them or touch in time the fringe of others. The official mothering which they received tended rather to keep them grouped than to spread them in the earlier years.
The first official, deliberate importation of colonists of blood foreign to Brazil or Portugal began in 1817, when Dom João brought in Swiss settlers. Agents of the Brazilian Government recruited no less than five thousand in Bern, although owing to delays and accidents only about two thousand sailed from Amsterdam and Rotterdam: landing on a hot coastal belt after a trying voyage, fever took the mountaineers, and but a sparse seventeen hundred reached the foot of the Serra do Mar. Climbing to the pretty nook where the town of their founding, Nova Friburgo, stands today in a shelter of green mountains, sickness still followed them, and only the hardiest or most resistant clung to the colony, survived and left their name to another generation. Many dispersed to other localities. Nova Friburgo, now reached by the Leopoldina railway, and a thriving city, fresh, flowery, producer of cereals and peaches, owns few Swiss inhabitants today. A second batch of immigrants, three hundred and forty-two Germans, filled some gaps in the ranks: their readiness for labour may have been heightened by memories of the difficulties of transit to Europe, for the journey had taken one hundred and eighty days in a sailing-ship. Germany at this period had not begun the industrial expansion which later kept all her people at home; economic conditions were severe on the ambitious worker, laws and social customs were irksome, and enterprising men looked across the seas for free lands. Germany became for about twenty-five years the very best recruiting ground for Brazil.
The second official colony was founded in Rio Grande do Sul, and consisted entirely of Germans—one hundred and twenty-six persons originally—who came in 1825. The colony was named São Leopoldo, used the water highway of the Rio dos Sinos until a railway line was built connecting it with Porto Alegre and with new colonies to the north, and has developed into one of the chief towns of the state, with forty thousand inhabitants. Its establishment was followed rapidly by that of Tres Forquilhas and S. Pedro de Alcantara, both in Rio Grande and both German, 1826; by another S. Pedro de Alcantara, also German, in Santa Catharina, 1826; Rio Negro, in Paraná, 1828, formed by disbanded German soldiers. Petropolis, the model city in the hills above Rio, owed its inception to Dom Pedro and was founded with Germans and Swiss, but not until 1848, for more than ten years of civil war down south in Rio Grande, when the “República de Piritinim” was proclaimed, checked colonizing projects in the Empire. With the suppression of trouble German colonizing was resumed in the south, Santa Catharina creating the Santa Isabel colony in 1845, while Rio Grande started five new centres between 1849 and 1850. The latter year is also memorable for the foundation of Blumenau, in Santa Catharina, by the good Herr Blumenau of Brunswick. At the same point on the lovely river Itajahy a little nucleus had existed precariously since 1827, added to by a group of one hundred and twenty-two Belgians in 1844; Herr Blumenau brought in Germans gradually at his own expense, supervising the colony in the rôle of a kind of paternal burgomaster, and in 1864 was able to count two thousand five hundred people; his efforts had, however, cost him about twelve thousand dollars. The Brazilian Government repaid him his outlay and made him official Director. Today Blumenau, once a small self-contained nucleo, is a bustling city with fifty thousand people, a lively exporting business and a railroad line. In 1850 the Dona Thereza colony in Paraná was started, while the famous Joinville, first called Dona Francesca, began in 1851 in Santa Catharina; it owed its existence to the fact that an Orleans scion, the Prince de Joinville, married a Brazilian princess who inherited large estates chiefly consisting of matto in Santa Catharina. The family ceded twelve square leagues of this land to the “Colonizing Union” of Hamburg, whence settlers were promptly sent, both the Prince and the Brazilian Government making a protégé of the nucleo. The large sums of money spent resulted in a fine town, now numbering some twenty-five thousand people, served by the Brazil Railways. A little later (1852) the Minas Geraes colony of Mucury was founded, but by this time German colonizing in arranged shipments had come to an end; any additional German colonists came singly. The German Government, both alarmed at the losses in blood—for emigration to North America and other parts of South America was also proceeding, although along different lines—and by reports sent home as the result of investigation which gave a poor account of the condition of the isolated nucleos, passed a law to forbid emigration to Brazil. Dom Pedro had to turn his attention to other countries.
Before the coming of the Germans, South Brazil was almost totally neglected; demand for tropical produce such as sugar and tobacco had kept the attention of Portuguese and their mixed-blood descendants for over three centuries to North Brazil, where negro slaves multiplied on the warm coast; the grassy uplands of the south attracted few Brazilians, and these chiefly bandeirantes whose main business was to keep out Spaniards from the Plate, and whose wild cattle strayed and bred on the natural pastures. So wild and untenanted was the country that up to the middle of the nineteenth century the German colonists had trouble with Indian raiders. But it was the right climate for the north-born Europeans, a wise choice that proved a success while other settlements dwindled out. During the same period there were several attempts to colonize Espirito Santo, notably at Santa Isabel, and Cachoeiras and Transylvania, six or seven starting between 1847 and 1856. The energy of the settlers was discounted by the hot climate, and many moved south, where the great increase in settlers’ populations is a fair criterion of their success. The official figures of German entries into Brazil from 1820 to the end of 1915 are one hundred and twenty-two thousand eight hundred and thirty, but the people of German blood in Brazil are now reckoned at about 250,000. The southerly towns under their influence are clean, well-kept, live centres, with constantly expanding industries. Rio Grande today is quite one of the best sections of Brazil: the influx of Italians brings them more than equal in numbers to the German element, taking the state as a whole.
With organized German settlement checked, Brazil during the eighteen fifties turned her attention to the mother country, and brought in Portuguese; they were settled in the warmer latitudes. In 1853, such a colony was begun in Maranhão, at Santa Isabel, followed by five more in the same northern and sultry state in 1855; in the same year three Portuguese colonies were established in Pará, at Nossa Senhora d’O, at Peçanha and at Silva, while Rio de Janeiro was planted with another five. A little later Bahia was given Portuguese colonies at Sinimbú, Engenho Novo and Rio Pardo. These and others were not strikingly successful until or unless joined by other colonists, for the Portuguese, who are artisans rather than agriculturists, melted from the lonely settlements and found jobs in the coast cities.
By this time coffee culture was coming into favour, the slave business was doomed, although the actual abolition of slavery did not occur until 1888, and planters invited immigrants to their developing estates. The work of obtaining immigrants was undertaken by individuals, as the Vergueiro family by Theophilo Ottoni and the Visconde de Baependy, with varying success, as well as by the International Society of Immigration of Rio, with headquarters in Antwerp. Colonists sent to coffee estates worked on the métayer or parceria system, inherently vicious. The colonist had the satisfaction of considering himself an independent worker, but as he started with a large debt, never owned land and earned no wages, his lot was a poor one if crops failed or the fazendeiro chanced to be unfair. He arrived owing for the passage of himself and family, and was given a house and a quantity of food—of the country; he cultivated a certain number of coffee trees, or allotment of sugarcane, took the harvest to the owner’s mill and received half the result after milling. It is said by J. L. Moré, in his book Le Brésil en 1852, that the hardworking Bavarians and Holsteiners who worked on this system in São Paulo often paid off their debts in four years and then had money in hand; but other investigators spoke adversely on the subject, finding colonists of ten and twelve years’ standing still indebted and living hopelessly. In the end the parceria gave way before a general wages system. The métayer plan still exists in some parts of Minas, Espirito Santo, São Paulo and other coffee regions, and can be found in the sugar districts and in the cacao region of Bahia, but large ownership of great scientifically-run estates has driven it from general employment. Investigations made by J. von Tschudi, sent by the Swiss Government in 1857, and by the German Consul Haupt ten years later, proved the failure of the share system; colonists could be seized and imprisoned if they tried to leave the estate on which they worked, and, unable to support life on the produce of their allotments, would have been even worse off had it not been for the “many acts of benevolence for which the emigrants had to thank the kindness natural to so many Brazilians,” says the author of Brazilian Colonization, a little brochure published under a pseudonym in London in the year 1873.
The same writer, giving a list of nationalities comprising the immigration into Brazilian states up to that time, nearly thirty-five years ago, before the great entry of the Italians had begun, or that of the Poles and Russians with their gift of hardy persistence, names a French colony taken to the banks of the Ivahy river in Paraná about 1850, which expired for want of transportation and therefore of markets; this, with the influx of Algerian French in 1868–1869 to a spot near Curityba, also in Paraná, is the most important attempt of the Gallic race to found settlements in Brazil; the disturbances of the latter, the first vine-growers of the state, gave the authorities as much trouble as the subsequent adventures of the Russians ten years later in the same region.
“Jacaré Assu” also mentions a few Alsatians in Nova Petropolis (Rio Grande); the Dutch families in Joinville, Rio Novo, Petropolis, and Leopoldina (Espirito Santo); the Tyrolian wanderers; the Danes of Estrella; the Mongolians—five hundred and sixty-six of them, who came by contract in 1856; and the colony of Icelanders who went to Joinville, and were “said to be doing very well.” He also speaks of the “colonies of Brazilians” in Brazil, who were settled in Estrella, at Sinimbú, Iguape and Itajahy; and the North American influx of 1867. This later item was the result neither of population overflow nor invitation, but was the result of the struggle between the North and South of the United States, the disappointed slave-owning southerners seeking a land where their losses could be forgotten. The exodus, of course, was in several directions: groups went into Mexico, some to Canada, to different parts of South America; I have seen an excellent colony of these migrants and their descendants at Toledo in the south of British Honduras, growing sugarcane and prospering. Those who came to Brazil were brought from the port of New York by the “United States and Brazil Mail Ships,” since defunct, the first batch of two hundred leaving in December, 1866. They were followed by some thousands, but today it is difficult to trace them, the groups into which they were originally assembled having long since broken up.