CHAPTER VII.
BRAZIL.
King John of Portugal, to whom Columbus first made offer of his project of discovery, was grievously chagrined when the success of the great navigator revealed the magnificence of the rejected opportunity. Till then, Portugal had occupied the foremost place as an explorer of unknown regions. She had already achieved the discovery of all the western coasts of Africa, and was now about to open a new route to the East by the Cape of Good Hope. Suddenly her fame was eclipsed. While she occupied herself with small and barren discoveries, Spain had found, almost without the trouble of seeking, a new world of vast extent and boundless wealth.
Portugal had obtained from the Pope a grant of all lands which she should discover in the Atlantic, with the additional advantage of full pardon for the sins of all persons who should die while engaged in the work of exploration. The sovereigns of Spain were equally provident in regard to the new territory which they were now in course of acquiring. They applied to Pope Alexander Sixth, who, as vicar of Christ, possessed the acknowledged right to dispose at his pleasure of all territories inhabited by heathens. From this able but eminently dissolute pontiff they asked for a bull which should confirm them in possession of all past and future discoveries in Western seas. The accommodating Pope, willing to please both powers, divided the world between them. 1493 A.D. He stretched an imaginary line, from pole to pole, one hundred leagues to the westward of the Cape de Verd Islands: all discoveries on the eastern side of this boundary were given to Portugal, while those on the west became the property of Spain. Portugal, dissatisfied with the vast gift, proposed that another line should be drawn, stretching from east to west, and that she should be at liberty to possess all lands which she might find between that line and the South Pole. Spain objected to this huge deduction from her expected possessions. 1494 A.D. Ultimately Spain consented that the Papal frontier should be removed westward to a distance of two hundred and seventy leagues from the Cape de Verd Islands; and thus the dispute was happily terminated.
1500 A.D. Six years after this singular transaction, by which two small European States parted between them all unexplored portions of the Earth, a Portuguese navigator—Pedro Alvarez Cabral—set sail from the Tagus in the prosecution of discovery in the East. He stood far out into the Atlantic, to avoid the calms which habitually baffled navigation on the coast of Guinea. His reckoning was loosely kept, and the ocean currents bore his ships westward into regions which it was not his intention to seek. After forty-five days of voyaging he saw before him an unknown and unexpected land. In searching for the Cape of Good Hope, he had reached the shores of the great South American Continent, and he hastened to claim for the King of Portugal the territory he had found, but regarding the extent of which he had formed as yet no conjecture. Three Spanish captains had already landed on this part of the continent and asserted the right of Spain to its ownership. For many years Spain maintained languidly the right which priority of discovery had given. But Portugal, to whom an interest in the wealth of the New World was an object of vehement desire, took effective possession of the land. She sent out soldiers; she built forts; she subdued the savage natives; she founded colonies; she established provincial governments. Although Spain did not formally withdraw her pretensions, she gradually desisted from attempts to enforce them; and the enormous territory of Brazil became a recognized appanage of a petty European State whose area was scarcely larger than the one-hundredth part of that which she had so easily acquired.
For three hundred years Brazil remained in colonial subordination to Portugal. Her boundaries were in utter confusion, and no man along all that vast frontier could tell the limits of Portuguese dominion. Her Indians were fierce, and bore with impatience the inroads which the strangers made upon their possessions. The French seized the bay of Rio de Janeiro. The Dutch conquered large territories in the north. But in course of years these difficulties were overcome. 1654 A.D. The foreigners were expelled. The natives were tamed, partly by arms, partly by the teaching of zealous Jesuit missionaries. Some progress was made in opening the vast interior of the country and in fixing its boundaries. On the coast, population increased and numerous settlements sprang up. The cultivation of coffee, which has since become the leading Brazilian industry, was introduced. 1750 A.D. Some simple manufactures were established, and the country began to export her surplus products to Europe. There was much misgovernment; for the despotic tendencies of the captains-general who ruled the country were scarcely mitigated by the authority of the distant Court of Lisbon. The enmity of Spain never ceased, and from time to time burst forth in wasteful and bloody frontier wars. Sometimes the people of cities rose in insurrection against the monopolies by which wicked governors wronged them. Occasionally there fell out quarrels between different provinces, and no method of allaying these could be found excepting war. 1711 A.D. Once the city of Rio de Janeiro was sacked by the French. Brazil had her full share of the miseries which the foolishness and the evil temper of men have in all ages incurred. These hindered, but did not altogether frustrate, the development of her enormous resources.
During the eighteenth century the Brazilian people began to estimate more justly than they had done before the elements of national greatness which surrounded them, and to perceive how unreasonable it was that a country almost as large as Europe should remain in contented dependence on one of the most inconsiderable of European States. The English colonies in North America threw off the yoke of the mother country. The air was full of those ideas of liberty which a year or two later bore fruit in the French Revolution. A desire for independence spread among the Brazilians, and expressed itself by an ill-conceived rising in the province of Minas Geraes. But the movement was easily suppressed, and the Portuguese Government maintained for a little longer its sway over this noblest of colonial possessions.
During the earlier years of the French Revolution, Portugal was permitted to watch in undisturbed tranquillity the wild turmoils by which the other European nations were afflicted. At length it seemed to the Emperor Napoleon that the possession of the Portuguese kingdom, and especially of the Portuguese fleet, was a fitting step in his audacious progress to universal dominion. 1807 A.D. A French army entered Portugal; a single sentence in the Moniteur informed the world that “the House of Braganza had ceased to reign.” The French troops suffered so severely on their march, that ere they reached Lisbon they were incapable of offensive operations. But so timid was the Government, so thoroughly was the nation subdued by fear of Napoleon, that it was determined to offer no resistance. The capital of Portugal, with a population of three hundred thousand, and an army of fourteen thousand, opened its gates to fifteen hundred ragged and famishing Frenchmen, who wished to overturn the throne and degrade the country into a French province.
Before this humiliating submission was accomplished, the Royal Family had gathered together its most precious effects, and with a long train of followers,[57] set sail for Brazil. The insane Queen was accompanied to the place of embarkation by the Prince Regent and the princes and princesses of the family, all in tears: the multitudes who thronged to look upon the departure lifted up their voices and wept. Men of heroic mould would have made themselves ready to hold the capital of the State or perish in its ruins; but the faint-hearted people of Lisbon were satisfied to bemoan themselves. When they had gazed their last at the receding ships, they hastened to receive their conquerors and supply their needs.