Many parts of Brazil display this beautiful tree. When the writer was first in Petropolis, in bright May weather, the avenues of that mountain city were gay with the large bright pink flowers of this grey-trunked, spreading exotic. Later, when the bolls ripen, the fibre is collected, sold by the kilo over many counters throughout the country, and used locally for stuffing pillows and cushions.
The price paid by France for paina fibre is about one hundred and forty to one hundred and sixty francs per hundred kilos of good-grade material: she imposes no duties against its entry. Brazil has many good fibres, but their extensive industrial use is as yet limited to aramina, of which coffee bags are made in S. Paulo, a flourishing industry, and the pita which is used by the Indians of Amazonas to make hammocks. These are woven with great art, interspersed along the edges with delicate feathers of gay-coloured Amazonian birds.
Fibre production in a scientific manner and on a commercial scale is only in its infancy in Brazil, but has recently shown interesting development. There are numbers of fine fibres native to the country, yielded not only by a large number of palms, one of which supplies the piassava exported for broom-making, but also by many plants of the aloe tribe. Some of these produce fibres equal in commercial value to the famous henequen (sisal) of Yucatan, upon which the rope-making industries of the United States so largely depend.
Banana fibre is used by the lace-makers of the north for the production of a curious, stiff, shiny lace of fairly intricate workmanship. The best specimens which I possess of this lace were bought at Maceió, but the great home of the lacemaker is Ceará. She usually works with linen or cotton threads, and is to be seen at every cottage door, with her pillow bristling like those of the Devonshire lace-makers, with scores of pins, while she throws the myriad bobbins to and fro, working her pattern on the pins.
Some of the lace produced is quite beautiful, of extreme fineness and intricacy, some of the most prized being the labyrintho, with its darned-in pattern of heavier, silky thread, among the fine filaments of the background. Lace-making is one of the small industries of Brazil which are little known, but deserve a better market.
CACAO
Cacao culture and preparation is the great absorbing industry of southern Bahia, where soil and climate, particularly along a couple of river valleys, combine to render the pretty little cacao tree fruitful. Not even coffee presents a more charming sight than a good cocoa plantation ready for harvest, the sun filtering through the light branches, and these, as well as the trunk thickly clustered with the big heavy red or yellow pods, looking something like elongated melons attached, almost stemless, to the strongest parts of the tree. Methods in use on many native plantations in Brazil are fairly primitive, and it is the exception to see the elaborate machinery for fermenting, washing, and drying such as is common in Trinidad; but the cacao produced is good, has a ready sale in a market which never seems to have too much cocoa and chocolate, and has made remarkably good prices since the European War began. Bahia is the great producing state, but Maranhão, Amazonas and Pará also send contributions to the export lists; the chief Bahian centres of production are Ilhéos and Itabuna, which send two-thirds of the crop, the rest coming from Cannavieiras and Belmonte primarily. The groves run inland for more than two hundred miles along the river valleys, full of the red triturated paste which is the base of Brazilian soil.
The cacao year is reckoned from May the first to April the thirtieth, and there are two gathering seasons: the safra proper begins in September and goes on until April, while the summer crop, the temperão, begins in May and has a less important yield. Practically, picking goes on all the year.
Cacao is native to the Americas, but its first cultivation and export from Bahia appears to date no earlier than about 1834, when there are records of shipments of 447 sacks of sixty kilos each. In 1840 the export was nearly 2,000 sacks, and in 1850 had risen to more than 5,000 sacks. In 1915 Bahia shipped about 750,000 sacks, as a result of the enthusiastic planting which has gone on in this favourable region for the last twenty years.
Until the war broke out the average price for six years for Brazilian cacao was about 725 reis a kilo—about seven cents a pound. It was at this price that Brazil sold an average of thirty-two thousand tons. In 1915 the price soared to 1$248 a kilo, or about twelve cents a pound, and Brazil with the biggest crop then on record exported 44,980 tons, a total exceeded in each of the following five years, 1919 showing exports of 93,000 tons, at 1$500 per kilo.