The coast for some way north from Rio continues high, but the steamers keep too far out to permit its beauties to be seen. Before one approaches Bahia, the mountains have receded, and at that city, though picturesque heights are still visible, they lie further back, and scarcely figure in the landscape. Still further north, towards Pernambuco, and most of the way northwestward to Pará, the coast is much lower. The bay of Bahia is singularly beautiful in its vast sweep, as well as in the verdure that fringes its inlets, and the glimpses of distant sunlit hills. Nor is the city, long the capital of Brazil, wanting in interest; for, though none of the buildings have much architectural merit, there is a quaint, old-fashioned look about the streets and squares, with many a house that has stood unchanged since the eighteenth century. The upper city runs along the edge of a steep bluff, sixty or eighty feet above the lower town, which is a single line of street, even more dirty than it is picturesque, occupying the narrow strip between the harbour and the cliff. Here, far more than in Parisianized Rio, one finds the familiar features of a Portuguese town reproduced, irregular and narrow streets, houses, often high, roofed with red tiles, and coloured with all sorts of washes, pink, green, blue, and yellow. Sometimes the whole front or side of a house is covered with blue or yellowish brown tiles, a characteristic of Portuguese cities—it is frequent in Oporto and Braga—which has come down from Moorish times. But a still greater contrast between this and southern Brazil is found in the population. In São Paulo there are few negroes, in Rio not very many, but here in Bahia all the town seems black. One might be in Africa or the West Indies. It is the same in Pernambuco and indeed all the way to the mouth of the Amazon.
Finding this to be a region filled with coloured people as São Paulo was with white people, and knowing that a thousand miles further west one would come into a region entirely Indian, one began to realize what a vast country Brazil is, big enough to be carved up into sixteen countries each as large as France. Were there natural boundaries, i.e. such physical features as mountain ranges or deserts, to divide this immense region into sections, the settled parts of Brazil might before now have split apart into different political communities. As it is, however, there are no such natural dividing lines, and if the Republic should ever break in pieces it will be differences in the character of the population or some conflict of material interests that will bring this about.
How has it happened that so huge a country has fallen to the lot of a people so much too small for it, since one can hardly reckon the true Brazilian white nation at more than seven millions?
What did happen was that the French, English, and Dutch, having their hands full in Europe, did not pursue their attempts to occupy the country with sufficient persistence and with adequate forces, and so lost their hold on the parts they had seized. Thus it became possible for a handful of Portuguese on the Atlantic coast to send out small colonizing parties into their unoccupied Hinterland, and as there were no civilized inhabitants to resist them, to go on acquiring a title to it without opposition until they met the outposts of the Spanish government who had advanced from the Pacific across the Andes just as the Portuguese had advanced from the Atlantic. Neither Portuguese nor Spaniards had been numerous enough to colonize this interior region of the continent, so it remains (save for a few trading posts on the rivers) an empty wilderness.
Nevertheless, though Brazil is physically all one country, it contains regions differing in climate, in economic resources, and in population. I will try in a few sentences to indicate the character of each.
The most northerly part along the frontiers of Guiana and also along a good deal of the coast between the mouth of the Amazon and Cape St. Roque is the least valuable, for large tracts are stony and protracted droughts are not uncommon. The extreme north has been hardly at all settled.
The east central part, consisting of the mountain ridges and table-lands referred to on page [368], together with slopes which descend on all sides from these highlands, is a region of great natural resources where all tropical crops and fruits can be produced. Most of it is healthy, much of it not too hot for white men to work and thrive, and the magnificent forests, no less than the mines, will make the mountains for many years to come no less a source of wealth than are the more level tracts. Its weak point is the want of white labour and the inefficiency of black labour.
This tropical region passes imperceptibly into the temperate country which occupies the states of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catharina, and Rio Grande, a section of the country no less fertile than the last and better fitted for European constitutions. Here all sub-tropical products can be raised; here also are forests; and here, where the land has not yet been brought under tillage, there is abundant and excellent pasture for all sorts of live stock. As the east central region is the land of cotton and sugar, so this southern region is the land of coffee and cattle,—coffee in its northerly parts, cattle and the cereals in its southern.
There remain the vast spaces of the west and northwest, still so imperfectly explored that it is hard to estimate their economic value. To the Amazonian forests, the Selvas, I shall return in another chapter.[97] They are the land of another great Brazilian staple—rubber. Most parts of the region where Brazil adjoins Bolivia, a vast level or slightly undulating country, partly grassy, partly covered with wood or scrub, is believed to be available either for cultivation or for ranching. At present access is difficult, and markets are far away, but when the districts of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina that lie between this region and the coast have been more fully settled, its turn will come.
Taking Brazil as a whole, no great country in the world owned by a European race possesses so large a proportion of land available for the support of human life and productive industry. In the United States there are deserts, and of the gigantic Russian Empire much is desert, and much is frozen waste. But on the Portuguese of Brazil nature has bestowed nothing for which man cannot find a use. Such a possession as this was far more than enough to compensate the little kingdom for the loss of the empire which it began in the sixteenth century to build up in India, before the evil days came after the death of King Sebastian.