The other road which owed its construction to the exciting tales from the gold camps ran between São Paulo city and the mines; its existence was limited by the days of prosperity of the gold-seekers, and when the rich deposits of alluvial gold were exhausted and the batea had perforce to be exchanged for the spade, the road was abandoned. The ill luck which attended the pitched battles of the Paulistas with other claimants to the General Mines caused the withdrawal of many fortune seekers back to the plantations of S. Paulo and hastened the decay of the highway.
Another of the few much-travelled roads of the colonial or indeed any period of Brazilian history, until the opening of the flat lands of the extreme south by imported European colonists, was one built by the Jesuits from the coastal colony of São Vicente to their own mission settlement at São Paulo; this highway negotiated the mangrove swamps of the flat belt edging the sea and then climbed the rocky barrier of the Serra do Mar to the cool interior plateau. Before the construction of this Caminho do Padre José the ascent must have taxed even the stout spirits of those indomitable priests. The good Padre Vasconcellos wrote, three hundred years ago, of the journey:—
“The greater part of the way one cannot really travel, but must make one’s way with hands and feet, clinging to the roots of trees, and this amongst such crags and precipices that I confess I trembled whenever I looked downwards. The depth of the valleys is tremendous and the number of mountains rising one above another appear to leave no hope of reaching the climax.... It is true that the labour of the ascent has its compensations now and again, for when I rested upon one of the rocks and looked below it seemed as if I were gazing from the heaven of the moon and that the whole round universe lay spread beneath my feet.”
When Fletcher (Brazil and the Brazilians) visited São Paulo in 1855, he made the trip from Santos on horseback over a Serra road, remarking on the excellence of the section on the flat to Cubitão; he was two days on the journey and says that the road “which traverses this range of mountains is probably the finest in Brazil, with the exception of the Imperial highway to Petropolis.”
This was not the first road constructed to bridge the barrier range, for in 1790 the Portuguese Governor superseded the Jesuit highway by a new one which included four miles of solid pavement and had more than one hundred and eighty angles before it reached the plateau. It was still too steep for wheeled traffic and the troops of mules which traversed it in thousands, bringing coffee from the interior after this product became a commercial factor and before the railway was built, often slid down the steep slopes on their haunches. It is said that both this and the first road were lined with the bones of mules that died by the way.
Similar stories are told of the Imperial road, built by that genuinely progressive ruler, Dom Pedro segundo, from Rio de Janeiro to his pet colony and residence Petropolis, a lovely nook in the heart of the Serra behind Guanabara Bay. This road, too, traversed flat, marshy ground before it began to climb the terrible Serra, and the latter section remained in use for some years after a railroad was constructed over the flats to the foot of the mountains: engineering difficulties were considered too great for a railroad until eventually Swiss engineers applied the same methods as had solved the problem in their own mountain country.
Many people in Brazil talk of the old coaching days in Petropolis, when stout mules toiled up the sharp gradients with their loads of passengers and freight. The team was changed in Petropolis and the route pursued on into Minas Geraes. This road is still in good condition—Petropolis the flower-decked and spotless is a centre of fine valley roads leading in seven different directions—and is a panorama of charming scenes. Like its sister mountain road in São Paulo and the “Graciosa” road from Curityba in Paraná, it has entered upon a new lease of life with the coming of the automobile.
Will the entry of the cheap automobile develop road-making in Brazil as it has assisted in that good work in the United States? It is possible. Before the War, the chief importation of motor-cars was from Europe, the class was high grade, beautiful and extremely powerful. It is said that no city in the world can show more expensive high-power cars than Rio de Janeiro, where every hired machine is called upon to climb the steep grades of Tijuca or some neighbouring mountain. There are large numbers of such cars also to be seen in wealthy S. Paulo, but they do not go far from the Avenida Paulista for lack of good roads; the luxurious European car does its chief duty within city bounds.
But with the introduction of the inexpensive car of North American build, the fazendeiro is acquiring a car for country use. It seems certain that what may be called the agricultural use of such cars will help to bring about improvement in interior highways that was not necessarily called for when a trusty horse or mule could negotiate any kind of a boggy track. At the same time it is not to be expected that Brazil will soon be extensively traversed by great high roads such as France possesses or such as the Romans left in Britain. The climate of half the country opposes itself to road permanence with all the force of the tropics. Burned and disintegrated by fierce sun, deluged and beaten by even fiercer rains, choked by the lush growth of a soil so fertile that a tangled green maze springs up almost overnight in any cleared space, a road has poor chance of surviving in many parts of Brazil unless unceasing labour and unending money is spent upon it. In the very regions where roads are most wanted on account of lack of other transportation means, there is usually the least chance of money being raised for their upkeep. In thinking of possible Brazilian highways, it is necessary to eliminate from present consideration much of the great teeming forestal belt of the north, and the precipitous Serra regions of the south sea-border; the areas where automobile roads could be built with a chance of permanence without exhausting expenses in upkeep are the flat lands of the north, where some excellent plans and beginnings have been made in Bahia and Pernambuco; part of Minas, where the Triangulo already has a public automobile highway service, connecting Uberabinha with the railway; the wide uplands of S. Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catharina and Rio Grande do Sul; and the interior plateau of Goyaz and Matto Grosso.
The proof that permanent, and not too costly roads, can be made in Brazil lies in the fact that they have been made: the Russian carters of Paraná take their teams over rough but serviceable trails on prairie lands, and across the high sertão of Matto Grosso that great and gallant explorer, Rondon, has built roads over which services of automobile trucks are maintained for the convenience of the telegraph building, geological and charting work of the Commission. The tale of the magnificent work in the interior done by the Rondon Commission is an epic of the Brazilian interior, and one of its great merits has been the proof that this unknown country is no terrible jungle, but an open, honest country awaiting the plough.