G. peruvianum is a highly interesting, hardy, prolific variety, relative of the best native cottons of Brazil. Professor Edward Green says that he considers it one of the two most valuable in the country. It is a perennial, grows best in the humid North, often reaches a height of four metres, and yields a crop for at least three years.[[13]] Maranhão has produced it for centuries, getting a reputation for long fine fibres on its account; the percentage of fibre is over thirty-eight per cent of the total weight of the boll, a very high average, and it is undoubtedly well adapted to the river valleys of North Brazil. It is said to be identified with the carefully cultivated, irrigated cotton of the Incas.
Cultivated forms of this excellent cotton are the famous Mocó, grown so successfully in Ceará, Parahyba, and other northerly states, the Seridó, and the Sede de Ceará, local names of which Brazil is proud.
G. microcarpum appears to have a relationship with the peruvianum, and seems also to be derived from the other side of the Andes; it is credited with producing a pound of clean cotton to one hundred and twenty bolls. This is the last on the list of cotton with “fuzz” on the seeds; the remaining four varieties have clean, free seeds. Of these by far the most important is the fine G. vitifolium. From this stock most of the cottons described as “Sea Island” are derived, as well as the best of the Egyptian varieties, and in a genuine wild state in Brazil it still produces a beautiful long silky fibre. When grandchildren of its stock have been brought to Brazil from the United States they have rapidly degenerated, delicate nurslings of exotic temperament; beside them the old estirpe selvagem flourishes and yields royally. G. purpurescens is another black-seeded perennial, identified with the “Bourbon” of Porto Rico, and said to owe its introduction into Brazil to the French. G. barbadense is a blood-brother of the vitifolium, and like all the Sea Island-Egyptian group, is a highly esteemed producer of top-priced cotton. The fourth of this class is G. brasiliense, a true native, observed growing wild by Jean Lery as early as 1557.
The two most precious of the list, Gossypium peruvianum and Gossypium vitifolium, possess the advantage of being genuine South Americans; they form a magnificent stock from which the expert cotton grower can develop a product for the market which need not fear Sea Island as a rival.
Cultivation of cotton by the Portuguese colonists began very soon after the granting of the capitanias in 1530. By the year 1570 large crops were being produced in Bahia, chief centre of industrial activity, although they could not equal sugar in value. Europe was just beginning to use this material, for with the acquisition of strips of India by the Portuguese there was an entry into European markets of Calicut “calico.” Before this dawn of the cotton era Europe went clothed in leather, wool, and, on occasions of great splendour, silk. We may conclude that the clothing of the day was probably as comfortable as, and certainly more substantial than, garments of the present period, if not as sanitary: but cleanliness had not yet become a virtue. India taught Europe the use of cotton, and the spindles and looms of the ladies were filled with the vegetable fibre in lieu of wool.
In Pernambuco the culture of cotton became of more importance than sugar; farther south the Paulistas set their Indian slaves to work and were soon producing cotton crops on widely spread plantations. In the seventeenth century cotton was carried into Minas Geraes by the gold hunting bandeirantes, but it was only cultivated in the most desultory manner and when there was nothing else for the slaves to do. So complete indeed was disregard of all agricultural work that actual famines occurred in 1697–98 and in 1700–01 on account of the abandonment of plantations for gold-washing districts.
When the Marquis de Pombal practically ruled the destinies of Portugal good fortune led him to take a shrewd interest in Brazil; especially interested in the comparatively new settlements at Pará and Maranhão, and struck by the fine fibre exported from these northerly regions, he decided upon the establishment of spinning and weaving mills. In 1750 the Marquis de Tavora was given the task of engaging expert weavers for the colonies, and shortly afterwards the first cotton-cloth factories were set up in Brazil. Pombal’s fatherly interest in weaving did not extend to the south; these sections of the country should devote their time to mining and agriculture, he thought, and finding that looms were being set up all along the coast and in the interior of Minas—always a good cotton region—he passed a law in 1766 prohibiting cotton and silk weaving. It had the desired effect of checking the development of any considerable commerce, but did not prevent the use of hand looms in almost every farm, where a patch of cotton was as much a part of the crop as a field of maize. In a relatorio of 1779 the Viceroy Luis de Vasconcellos reported to Lisbon on the “independence of the people of Minas of European goods, establishing looms and factories in their own fazendas, and making cloth with which they clothe themselves and their families and slaves....”
In 1785 the Portuguese Government ordered the suppression of all factories in Brazil; they must have been considerably advanced, despite the previous orders, if the decree abolishing establishments for making “ribbons, laces of gold or silver velvets, satins, taffetas, bombazine, printed calico, fustian,” etc., etc., meant anything. In spite of this the weaving of coarse cottons managed to survive, perhaps with the connivance of sympathetic Viceroys, and repeated letters emphasized the inconvenience of factories in Brazil: a carta regia of 1802 instructed the Governor of Minas Geraes not to allow “anyone to present himself before him unless dressed in materials manufactured in the Kingdom or the Asiatic dominions.”
The transference of the Portuguese monarchy to Brazil in 1808 changed all these ideas—which helps to demonstrate the still burning need for all rulers, of whatever denomination, to take a travelling course—and in a few years cotton threads and cloths were freed from duties, the Prince Regent sent a master-weaver at his own expense to set up fabricas in the interior, and by 1820 the industry was thriving. Cotton growing was equally stimulated at this period by high prices in England; in 1818 that country was not only buying raw cotton, but cotton cloth, from Brazil.
With the development of the south of the United States in cotton production on a great scale a shadow fell over the Brazilian industry. Unable to compete with the low prices at which North America offered her bales in the early eighteen-forties the farmers of the southerly states of Brazil checked their planting, and, coffee just then dawning upon them as a commercial possibility, filled up the empty spaces in the fields with the beans of coffea arabica. North Brazil, with its special cottons of long staple, kept on producing these varieties for home mills, steadily at work, and for European export; a new incentive came with the Civil War of the United States when Confederate cotton shipments were contraband and English spinners were at their wits’ end for raw material, but prices sank with the declaration of peace.