The work of State Societies of Agriculture is more highly specialized, and cotton has its list of societies just as coffee, cacao, sugar and tobacco have theirs. Many big cotton estate owners take a keen interest in improving conditions of production, and have been during the last few years definitely helped by the American expert already referred to and by a Texan cotton grower at the head of demonstration farms operated by the Leopoldina Railway Company. One meets in Brazil an unusually high percentage of finely educated men who are fazendeiros, who willingly leave the gay cities of the coast to live in patriarchal authority upon interior farms having as their sole connection with the outside world a narrow mule-track; they appear to have inherited the affection for land of their own possession which sent the early Portuguese so far afield, and which seldom seems to be mingled with any dislike of solitude. It is this feeling which scantily populates the sertão with fazendas, far removed from any town, dotting the vast interior with nucleos of independent life; it may be partly due to a strain of Indian ancestry, for it extends to the upper reaches of the Amazon and its tributaries, lining, at infrequent intervals, the banks of forest-bound rivers with palm-thatch huts, their foundations in the water, where families subsist upon a handful of farinha, and fish caught in the flood below them, looking with unenvious eyes at the passing boats of rubber collectors and apparently quite content with their withdrawal from the world. To such a people, not markedly gregarious, the opening of great tracts of interior is in accord with their instincts, and cultivation is but a matter of communication and transport.
The cotton country of Brazil needs expert growers and good roads or rail service; it will not lack the work of the small native farmer.
There is a cotton cloth factory near Pernambuco which is an excellent example of a self-contained industry in Brazil. Situated seven miles outside the mediæval port-city of Olinda, whose narrow cobbled streets are lined with tiled and gabled houses reminiscent of Dutch regimen, the estate covers forty-five square miles of pasture and woodland besides the area directly occupied by the works and the village of employees; one edge borders on the sea, fringed with coconuts, and there are two little ports where native barcaças bring their loads of raw cotton and merchandise, at the mouths of two rivers flowing through the estate.
Here, on the warm coast of the northern promontory with its tropic vegetation and mestizo population, a Brazilian company started a factory for spinning and weaving; it was not a marked success until Herman Lundgren, an energetic man of Swedish birth, resident in Brazil since 1866 and later a naturalized Brazilian, took over the management of the property. He made an arrangement by which the original owners were paid ten per cent on their investment, all farther profits belonging to himself, and later on bought out the old stockholders; new machinery was brought from Great Britain, technical workers imported from Manchester, and the scope of the business enlarged so that today all processes for producing fine coloured cotton cloths are performed on the estate—spinning, weaving, dyeing and colour-printing. When the writer visited the factory in the early part of 1915 a shortage of dyestuffs was predicted and I understand that since that time experiments have been successfully made with native vegetable dyes, too long abandoned for the convenient aniline varieties.
The factory employs three thousand five hundred people, of whom seventy per cent are women and children; the total population in the village is fifteen thousand. Over thirty-five thousand dollars a month is paid in wages. The manager of the mills, an Englishman, spoke highly of the Brazilian operatives: the company has never taken any measures to import other labour than that of the district; the majority of the workmen’s dwellings are built and owned by the company, and are rented out cheaply, while in some cases these modest cottages of sun-dried brick, thatched with palm or covered with a zinc or tile roof, have been erected by the workmen themselves, their only obligation to the company being the payment of ground rent of two to four milreis a month, the palm-thatched house paying the lowest and the zinc-roofed the highest rate. The company maintains a school, hospital and dispensary, free, for the villagers.
Apart from the mills the estate contains a dairy and stock farm—where some well-known English horses occupy stables, apparently unperturbed by their transference to Brazilian tropics—tile and brick factories, a bakery, blacksmith’s shop, and lumber yard. The company uses one thousand tons of coal a month when it can be obtained, but curtailment of imports since the outbreak of the European War has entailed a greater use of wood fuel. This is cut from the matto on the estate, typical Brazilian woodland of great beauty, containing a marked variety of different trees, but notable for its absence of animal life with the exception of insects and some fine butterflies in the neighbourhood of streams and pools.
The estate produces no cotton, purchasing all of this raw material from Pernambuco and Parahyba; one hundred and fifty bags weighing seventy-five kilos each are used daily, and the monthly bill for cotton amounted to £35,000 or £40,000 even when the price of Brazilian cotton was down to about eleven milreis an arroba (fifteen kilos), equal at the rate of exchange then prevailing to about eight cents a pound United States currency; but towards the end of 1915 native cotton rose in Brazil to twenty-five and thirty cents a pound in consequence of the drought in the North followed by crop failures, and factories all over the country suffered from the shortage.
Pernambuco and other northern factories had an advantage in being nearer sources of supply, the difference in freight enabling these mills to get raw material at a rate at least twenty per cent below that paid by the importers of Rio and S. Paulo. From forty thousand pounds to fifty thousand pounds a year is spent by the factory on drugs, colours and chemicals.
Production of cotton cloth averages one million, five hundred thousand metres a month, woven on nine hundred and sixty looms; the cloth measures twenty-two to twenty-six inches in width and has an immense variety, from heavy blue denim to fine flowered fabrics woven or printed in brilliant colours, beloved by Brazilian working classes. Trains of mules pass daily along the road from the factory, each animal carrying two bales of cotton cloth weighing seventy-five kilos each; the whole of this output is sold in Brazil, distributed over half a score of different States by shops established by the company. There are over eighty of these stores, selling cloth and also ready made garments of simple make, in Pernambuco State alone, as well as others in Bahia, Ceará, Parahyba, Rio, S. Paulo, Matto Grosso, etc.