THE SOLIS THEATRE.THE SOLIS THEATRE.
The unitarians, then in power at Buenos Aires, naturally sympathised with the leader of their old colorado allies, and were inclined to aid Flores's attempt to regain control of Montevideo. Brazil favoured his pretensions even more actively. The Brazilians of Rio Grande owned most of the land and cattle just over the Uruguayan border, a third of all the rural properties in the republic being taxed to them, and complaints of extortion often came to the Rio government. The blanco president refused the satisfaction demanded, and Brazil determined to enforce the claims of her citizens. Flores was formally recognised as the legitimate ruler of the country, and a fleet and army were sent to his assistance. Lopez, dictator of Paraguay, thought Brazil's intervention in Uruguay dangerous to the internationalequilibrium of South America. He protested, and when the Brazilian government persisted and sent its army over the border he began war. The Brazilians advanced to Montevideo and their fleet came down the coast. The city was blockaded by sea and besieged by land, while the main body of the allies advanced against the town of Paysandù on the Uruguay River, where the blancos had assembled in force. The place was taken by assault and given up to a horrible pillage, the recollection of which is still graven in the memory of Uruguayans. The blanco party never recovered from the slaughter. Those in Montevideo saved themselves by surrendering the town without resistance. Flores entered in triumph and the blanco leaders fled into exile.
Flores was under obligations to lead a division in the war against Paraguay, and he absented himself for that purpose for nearly two years, during which the country districts were somewhat disturbed. In 1867 he returned and restored order with a strong hand. This short lease of undisturbed power was employed in making many important improvements. Great public edifices were completed, the telegraph cable was laid to Buenos Aires, the building of railroads was begun, and a new civil code adopted. Immigration was resumed on a large scale and the country felt the economic impulse that was already transforming the whole Plate valley. Although the country rapidly prospered under the military administration of Flores, the feeling of the blancos remained intensely bitter, and on the 15th of February,1868, the colorado president was assassinated in the streets of Montevideo.
Flores's death was the signal for wholesale executions and for the outbreak of another long blanco insurrection. Although the growth of wealth and population had never been more rapid than at this very time, the country was not free from civil disturbance until 1872, when an armistice was signed. A year later troubles broke out again and the troops refused to march against the insurgents. To the bitterness of party feeling and the official corruption which diminished the revenue and hampered commerce was added the embarrassment of the financial difficulties which followed the great panic of 1873. The public debt had doubled in the ten years between 1860 and 1870 and now reached the enormous figure of over forty million dollars, nearly $150 for each inhabitant in the country. One president after another was unable to maintain himself in the face of the financial and political difficulties of the situation, but in 1876 General Lorenzo Latorre, an intelligent and determined colorado chief, became dictator. For economy's sake, he reduced the number of army officers, of whom there were over twelve hundred for two thousand privates. He rooted out the worst frauds in the customs service, and refunded the public debt, compelling the foreign creditors to accept six instead of twelve per cent. interest. At the same time he rigidly suppressed the disorders which had harassed the country since the murder of Flores. The bands of marauders, assassins, and bandits, who had exercised theirnefarious occupations under cover of belonging to the insurrectionists, were relentlessly pursued and brought to justice. For the first time in years a traveller could traverse the country from end to end without arms. Like Flores, Latorre often used brute force to secure peace and order, and the Uruguayans were too turbulent to submit long to such dictation. Countless conspiracies were formed which were bloodily suppressed, but public fear and dislike of Latorre grew continually more menacing. In 1880, tired out with constant anxieties and grieved over what he considered the ingratitude of his countrymen, Latorre resigned his office and went into exile.
His successor, Dr. Vidal, held the presidency for only two years, when he, too, was forced to resign. The next president, Maximo Santos, served his complete term of four full years, ending in 1886. Then Vidal managed to get back into power for a few months and was again replaced by Santos, who, in turn, was succeeded by Tajes, who governed the country until 1890. The ten years succeeding the resignation of Latorre were materially very prosperous. The sheep industry developed tremendously; the production of wheat was more than doubled; immigration ran up to nearly 20,000 a year; the population of the country reached 700,000, having increased from 400,000 in twelve years. Immigration had been so great that the number of the foreign-born almost equalled the natives, even when including in the latter those of foreign parentage. In the mixture of nationalities the foundations have beenlaid for a race of unusual vigour and of pure Caucasian descent.
The bitterness of the old factional feeling largely died out during the disturbances which succeeded the murder of Flores. The blancos had suffered terrible losses in 1864, and the colorados had become far the more numerous party. During Latorre's dictatorship the distinctions between the two were almost lost, and the blanco party, by that name at least, ceased to be an active factor in politics. New factions, however, took their place, but the struggles for place and power lacked the conviction and ferocity of the old civil wars. The gaucho and Creole element, although still politically dominant, was diluted by the infiltration of a more industrially minded population. The people were not so exclusively pastoral and had ceased to be so military in their tastes. The foreign immigrants wanted peace,—a chance to sow their wheat and tend their sheep undisturbed,—and the gaucho, living on his horse, feeding on beef alone, and always ready to ride off to fight by the side of his favourite chief, ceased in many of the departments to be the dominant factor. Politics became largely a game played by the ruling Spanish-American caste and did not directly interfere with the material interests of the country, and rarely affected the maintenance of law and order.
The prosperity of the eighties had been accompanied by an enormous increase in governmental expenditures and debt. The economies so painfully enforced in Latorre's administration wereabandoned. Nearly as much money was spent in ten years as had been in the previous fifty years of the republic's existence. The debt more than doubled, and the deficit each year equalled fifty per cent. of the receipts. The Buenos Aires panic of 1890 brought on grave commercial difficulties; real estate dropped one-half; prices fell, and, as usual, the people blamed the government. Political disturbances began with an attempt at a blanco uprising in Montevideo in 1891. The clergy were active in fomenting dissatisfaction, but the trouble was suppressed for the time. Herrera y Obes, elected in 1890, served his term out, but the government was getting deeper and deeper into the financial mire, in spite of having cut down the rate of interest on the public debt fifty per cent. The murmurs of the public grew constantly more menacing against a taxation which had become so excessive that it almost threatened the destruction of industries.
When the election came on in 1894 the outgoing president found that he had not control of Congress, the body which elects the president. A deadlock ensued and the ballots were taken amid confusion and fears of intimidation. Ellaure, the president's candidate, dared not accept because of the threatening attitude of the opposition. Finally, Juan Idiarte Borda was declared elected, amid outcries and protests against dictation and terrorism. The new president pledged himself to reform the finances and pursue a conciliatory policy toward the different factions, but he was soon accused of extravagance and favouritism. The blancos had again become aformidable party after twenty years of eclipse, and they believed that they were being deprived of their political rights by the colorado president. In 1896 he procured the election of a Congress completely under his control, and early in 1897, seeing no hope of a constitutional change, a blanco colonel named Lamas raised the standard of revolt, assembled a force in the western provinces, and gained a victory over the president's soldiers. He marched east and joined Aparicio Saraiva, a chief belonging to a family celebrated in the military annals of Brazil, who had brought a considerable force over the border. The rebels soon had possession of the eastern departments and menaced Montevideo, while Borda borrowed money right and left and armed and drilled regiment after regiment to prosecute the war against them. Nevertheless, the rebels maintained themselves and roamed the country at will. They would listen to no terms that did not include Borda's resignation, and it seemed as if the country was doomed to pass through another long and bloody civil war.
On August 25, 1897, President Borda was assassinated in the streets of Montevideo by a respectable grocer's clerk. The vice-president, Juan L. Cuestas, succeeded peacefully to the control of the government in Montevideo, and at once entered into negotiations with the leaders of the insurrectionists in the departments. Terms were quickly agreed upon. Cuestas conceded minority representation and electoral reform, and in a very short time the rebels had laid down their arms. The few months of warhad cost Uruguay dear. Thirteen million dollars had been spent by the government, the collection of the revenue had been interrupted, and internal transportation had been demoralised. Now, however, industry and commerce resumed their usual course, and, since President Cuestas's accession to power, the peace of the country has been undisturbed. Political manifestations have been confined to disputes in Congress and the press. They became so violent that in 1898 the president dissolved the chambers and declared himself dictator. He reorganised the army on a basis which insured that there would be no mutinies, and at the same time pursued a policy of administrative reform which has done much to bring order out of the financial confusion. The obligations of the government have been religiously performed, and Uruguay's currency is on a gold basis. In 1899 Cuestas was elected president according to the forms of the Constitution. He carried out the pledge he had given the blancos not to interfere with the elections, and in 1900 they made great gains and elected enough members to control the Senate. The political situation has, therefore, been somewhat strained, but there seems to be no danger that the congressional opposition will try to interfere with the executive functions of the president.
THE CATHEDRAL, MONTEVIDEO.THE CATHEDRAL, MONTEVIDEO.
This gallant and pugnacious little people will continue to play a rôle in South American affairs out of all proportion to the size of their country. Uruguay seems certain to continue to be the political storm-centre of the Atlantic coast. Climate, soil, andgeographical position insure a rapid increase in population and wealth, while its political independence must continue to be an object of constant solicitude on the part of its gigantic neighbours, Argentina and Brazil. Montevideo is a formidable trade rival to Buenos Aires, and must always be, as it has so often been in the past, the base for any attach at the heart of the Argentine Republic. To the north nothing but an artificial boundary separates Uruguay from Rio Grande do Sul, and the two regions are alike in everything except language. Should the Portuguese-Americans again evince those tendencies toward expansion which distinguished them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Uruguay would be the natural point of attack, and if Brazil should ever divide into its component parts, as it came so near doing in 1822 and again in 1837, Rio Grande and Uruguay might find it necessary to coalesce, or possibly wars might ensue between them which would change the face of South America. A not improbable alternative would be the establishment of a power on the north bank of the Plate strong enough to hold its own, and which might play the same rôle in the interaction of Spanish and Portuguese Americans as did Flanders between the Teutons and Latins in Europe.
BRAZIL
The motherland of Brazil is Portugal. Profound as were the changes incident to transplanting a people to a virgin continent; notwithstanding Spanish dominion and Dutch conquests; large as were the admixtures of negro, Indian, and alien blood; in spite of independence and Republicanism; the language, customs, religion, and laws of Brazil are to-day substantially like those of Portugal.
The parallel between the United States and Britain is not closer. Brazil has diverged even less than her model. Her population may have a larger admixture of non-Portuguese blood than the North Americans have of non-British, but politically there was less opportunity for divergence, for Brazil was kept under much closer subordination. The discovery of Brazil coincided with the destruction of popular liberties in the mother-country. Thereafter, the Portuguese government was a centralised despotism, and its hand lay heavy on the Brazilian provinces. They were forbidden intercourse with the rest of the world; functionaries of every kind were continuallyimported; the provinces never dreamed of asserting any right to self-government; from the beginning the system was centralising and stifling. The North American colonies of England were left to grow up by themselves; they were never under a colonial government properly so called; a revolt followed the first serious attempt to subject them to a real colonial régime. But the independence of Brazil came because liberties were finally granted, not because they were threatened to be taken away. The country remained under a tutelage, growing continually more rigorous, and which ceased only after the Portuguese monarch had fled from Lisbon and the colony had become greater than the mother-country.
OUTLINE MAP OF BRAZILClick here for a larger image
Click here for a larger image
It is, therefore, in the little peninsular kingdom, during the centuries before Cabral caught sight of the South American coast, that we must look for the beginnings of Brazil. Rome gave to Portugal laws, language, religion, and architecture; the forests of Germany modified her political institutions; the Saracens gave her the arts, navigation, and material civilisation. Her happy geographical position near the Straits of Gibraltar made her the meeting-place for the Mohammedan and Christian religions—of Levantine civilisation with Teutonic barbarism and liberty. That position also enabled the qualities of daring and enterprise and the scientific knowledge acquired in centuries of long conflicts and intercourse with the Moors to be turned to immediate advantage when the Renaissance came. Portugal was the pioneer of Europe in discovery and colonisation, though Spain followed close after. Together they led in making Western European civilisation dominant beyond seas. The nations who followed in their track have long since passed them, but Portugal had once the opportunity of spreading her influence and institutions over half the planet. In Brazil she mixed success with the failure that was her fate elsewhere. Brazil is to-day the nation which has inherited Roman civilisation in the least modified form, and is the country where the genuine Latin spirit has the best opportunity for growth and survival.
The study of Portugal takes on a new dignity and importance when we reflect that she has given language, institutions, and laws to half of South America and to a population that already outnumbers her own four to one. She is entitled to the interest of the world if only because she has placed her indelible imprint on a region which is as large as Europe and as fertile as Java, and which is destined within the next two centuries to support the largest population of any of the great political divisions of the globe.
In the twelfth century, the coalescence of a fragment of the kingdom of Leon with the Moorish territory near the mouth of the Tagus originated Portugal as a separate country. The race was very mixed. Its principal elements were the Leonese and the Mosarabes—the latter being the Christians of Moorish Portugal left undisturbed from Visigothic times by their tolerant Mohammedan conquerors. Each of these elements was, in its turn, of mixedorigin. To the original Iberian population, which had occupied the Peninsula two thousand years before the Christian era, had been successively added Phenicians, Greeks, Celts, Ligurians, Carthaginians, Latins,—and in Roman times,—officials, soldiers, and slaves from all over the empire, including many Jews. The long Roman dominion welded all these together into a homogeneous mass. Later, the Visigothic conquest added a large Teutonic contingent, which is especially evident in northern and Leonese Portugal. Still later, the Saracens intermarried in considerable numbers with the Mosarabes of southern Portugal. After the formation of the modern kingdom, another element was added in the French, Provençals, Flemings, and English who came in large numbers to aid in the final expulsion of the Moors. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Portuguese had become a distinct nation. Racial and religious tolerance were more advanced than in the rest of Europe; self-governing municipalities covered the greatest part of the country, each privileged within a definite territory. The nobles, prelates, and monastic and military orders were still privileged, and their property was not subject to tribute, but their power was not predominant. The king was chief of the army and the proprietor of a very considerable proportion of the land, but he was under constant pressure to grant it to the religious orders and to the nobles. The people were everywhere heavily taxed—in the municipalities and Crown lands by the king, and on the estates of the privileged orders for the benefit of their great proprietors. The nobles were under no enforceable obligation to perform military service. A great general deliberative and representative assembly—the Cortes—had come into being when the monarchy was founded. It included representatives of the municipalities as well as nobles and clergy, and its importance and vitality are shown by the fact that from 1250 to 1376 it met twenty-five times. By the latter date, jurisprudence had become generalised and its administration had fallen into the hands of the Crown. The nation had developed out of local and class privilege a reasonably consistent and uniform administration. The municipalities were the basis of the governmental structure, and a rude but effective local self-government existed through their instrumentality. The norm for the centralisation and organisation had not been, as in nearly all the rest of Europe, the feudal system, but the surviving fragments of the Roman structure. To the municipalities was largely due the astonishing vigour shown by the Portuguese people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The norm even survived the destruction of liberty, and its influence can be seen in every step of the subsequent development of Portugal and also of Brazil.
Portugal's heroic era began near the close of the fourteenth century. The great King John I., founder of the dynasty of Aviz, secured Portugal for ever from absorption by Spain when he won the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385. This was the signal for a rapid transformation of the character and policies of the Portuguese people. The thirst for war andadventure grew. The old Portugal—laborious, agricultural, home-loving, conservative—was replaced by a new Portugal—adventurous, seafaring, eager, romantic, longing for conquest, glory, and wealth, its eyes straining over the sea, the embodiment of the spirit of the Renaissance on its material side. The meeting of the Levant and the Baltic, the East and the West, Mohammedans and Christianity, the arts and knowledge of the old races with the energy of the new, had at last produced its perfect work. In 1415 an army was sent into Africa, and Ceuta was conquered; and there began that marvellous series of voyages which not only transformed Portugal into an empire, but gave a new world to Europe and revolutionised the planet. Modern scientific navigation began with the sailors instructed in the school which was set up at Sagres by Prince Henry, King John's son. Until then, European nautical knowledge had been very meagre. The compass served only to indicate direction, not distance or position, and did not suffice for the systematic navigation of the open Atlantic. The Portuguese first made that possible by using astronomical observations and inventing the quadrant and the astrolabe.
This knowledge, once acquired, was promptly applied to the work of navigation. Madeira was discovered in 1418; the Canaries in 1427; the Azores in 1432. The first and last were colonised and rapidly became populous. To the West the explorers pushed no farther for the present, but to the south they reached Cape Blanco in 1441, Senegambia and Cape Verde in 1445, and the Cape Verde Islandsin 1460. In 1469, they turned into the Gulf of Guinea, and in 1471 were the first Europeans to cross the Equator. Their search, at first random, now became definite. They believed it was only necessary to keep on and they would round the southern extremity of Africa and reach Abyssinia and India by sea, a hope which became a certainty in 1487, when Bartholomew Diaz finally reached the Cape of Good Hope.
Meanwhile, a political revolution had been going on. The strong kings of the line of Aviz had won for the Crown a moral preponderance over the nobility and clergy. The latter resisted the royal encroachments, but the municipalities joined the monarchs in the struggle against them. The king who established centralised despotism—the Richelieu of Portugal—was John II., the third of the Aviz dynasty, and who reigned from 1481 to 1495. Under his rule, the whole military power was concentrated in the Crown; the nobility became a class living at Court; the king was the fountain of all honour and advancement; local officers were replaced by officials appointed by and responsible to the central government; piece by piece the independent functions of the municipalities were taken away.
Concentration of power in the hands of monarch and bureaucracy produced its inevitable effect. A short period of marvellous brilliancy in arms, statecraft, literature, and the arts was followed by sudden decay. The self-governing municipalities had nurtured a multitude of men whom small power and responsibility fitted for great things. The nationturned eagerly to the work of exploration and conquest and prosecuted it efficiently.
Such a people would undertake conquest for their king, rather than colonisation on their own account; they would emigrate under military leadership and forms; their colonies would tolerate a close control by the mother country; they would seek to convert the aborigines and reduce them to slavery; private initiative would be stifled and overshadowed by that of the government; large proprietorship would be the rule; the colonies would be burdened with functionaries sent in successive swarms from home; taxation would be excessive; the best talent would go into the bureau and not concern itself with industrial matters; invention and originality would be discouraged; agriculture would not be diversified, nor manufactures thrive. To this day a few staple crops predominate in Brazil; small landownership is the exception, and the people show little aptitude for change when unfavourable circumstances make their crops unprofitable. Brazilian Creoles have little taste for manual pursuits, and not much more for commerce. Non-Portuguese immigration has supplied most of the labour; foreigners have always conducted most of the trade.
On the 9th of March, 1500, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, a Portuguese nobleman of illustrious birth, but not yet distinguished by any notable feats in war or seamanship, sailed from Lisbon for the East Indies. This expedition was sent out to continue the work begun by Vasco da Gama in the first all-sea voyage to India. It was an advance-guard for the larger armament that two years later founded the Portuguese empire on the coasts of India. Vasco da Gama himself wrote Cabral's sailing orders. The latter was instructed, after passing the Cape Verde Islands in 14° North, to sail directly south, as long as the wind was favourable. If forced to change his course, he was ordered to keep on the starboard tack, even though it led him south-west. When he reached the latitude of the Cape of Good Hope—34° South—he was to bear away to the east.
These sailing instructions have been the subject of much discussion. Many believe their sole purpose was to enable Cabral to avoid the Guinea calms, so annoying to sailing ships near the African coast.Others contend that Da Gama had seen signs of land to the west on his own voyage, and that its discovery was a real, though secondary, object of the expedition. In any event the Brazilian coast is too near the natural route around Africa to have escaped encounter, and would infallibly have shortly been seen by some one else.
OLD TOWER AT LISBON WHENCE THE FLEET SAILED.OLD TOWER AT LISBON WHENCE THE FLEET SAILED.
Forty-two days after leaving Lisbon, Cabral's fleet saw unmistakable signs of land, being then in latitude 17 degrees south and longitude 36 degrees west. From the Cape Verde Islands, just off the western point of Africa, he had made 2300 miles, and had come 500 miles to the west. The next day a mountain was sighted, which he called Paschoal,because it was Easter week. This mountain is in the southern part of the state of Bahia, about four hundred miles north-east of Rio, and on a coast that to this day is sparsely inhabited and rarely visited. The following day the whole fleet came to an anchor a mile and a half from the shore, and just north of the dangerous Abrolhos reefs. This was the 23rd of April, Old Style, which corresponds with the 3rd of May in the Gregorian calendar. The date is a national holiday in Brazil, and the anniversary for the annual convening of Congress.
Because no quadrupeds or large rivers were seen, Cabral thought he had discovered an island and named it the "Island of the True Cross." The name has not survived except in poetry. He stopped ten days on the coast, took formal possession, and sent expeditions on shore which entered into communication with the Indians, who were seen in considerable numbers. It is characteristic that the first question asked of the Indians was if they knew what gold and silver were. They were peaceable and friendly, and the old chronicle describes them as of a dark reddish complexion with good features, and muscular, well-shaped bodies. They wore no clothes, their lower lips and cheeks were perforated to carry great ornaments of white bone, and their hair was elaborately dressed and adorned with feathers.
These were fair specimens of the Tupi-Guaranies, the largest of the four great families into which the Brazilian aborigines have been classified. The others are the Caribs, the Arawaks, and the Botacudos.There are also traces of tribes who inhabited the country remote centuries ago. In caves in Minas Geraes skeletons have been found remarkably like those of the earliest Europeans. The theory is that these Indians came from Europe by land in that remote geological epoch when Scandinavia was joined to Greenland. Later came Mongoloids, probably by way of the Behring Strait, who appear largely to have exterminated their European predecessors, and to have been the ancestors of the modern Indians.
When America was discovered, the four great families were spread in scattering and widely differing tribes over the whole of Brazil and the adjacent countries. Their state of culture varied from that of the most squalid tribes of Botacudos, who had not even reached the Stone Age, lived in brush shelters, slept in the ashes of their fires, practised promiscuous marriage, and had no idea of religion except a fear of malignant spirits; up to Arawaks, who were cleanly, had a well-defined tribal organisation, and built marvellous canoes, or Tupis, who cultivated the soil, built fair houses, used rude machinery for making mandioc flour, spun cotton, wove cloth, and were good potters. But the civilisation of the best of them was stationary. No Brazilian tribe ever got beyond the condition where the struggle to obtain food was its sole preoccupation. No civilisation like that of Mexico, Peru, or Yucatan ever existed. Disaggregation, failure, and obliteration were the rule. Organically unfitted to cope with their surroundings they never devised a method of getting a good and permanent food-supply. Defective nutrition sapped their powers to resist strains. Their muscular appearance was not accompanied by corresponding endurance. Their European taskmasters could never understand why they died from the effects of exertion to which a white man would easily have been equal. The vast majority had no regular agriculture and lived on the spontaneous products of the forests and the streams. Land game is not abundant in the tropics, and they had developed only few good food plants. What they did procure was spoiled by bad preparation. Such a people had no chance of successfully resisting the Portuguese invaders, and their only hope of survival was in contact and admixture with the more vigorous white and black races.
A TUPI VILLAGE.A TUPI VILLAGE.
The Tupi-Guaranies occupied one-fourth of Brazil,all of Paraguay and Uruguay, and much of Bolivia and the Argentine, and it is probable that the original seats of this family were in the central table-lands or in Paraguay. All Tupi Indians spoke dialects of one language, which the Jesuit missionaries soon reduced to grammatical and literary form, and which became alingua francathat was understood from the Plate to the Amazon. Back of the coast Tupis were the Botacudos, the most degraded and intractable of Brazilian savages, remnants of whom still survive in their original seats in Espirito Santo, Minas, and São Paulo. The Caribs, with whom students of the history of the Caribbean Sea are familiar, originated in the plains of Goyaz and Matto Grosso and emigrated as far north as the Antilles. The Arawaks were most numerous in Guiana and on the Lower Amazon, but were also spread over central Brazil.
The Brazilian Indians did not survive the white man's coming to as large an extent as in Spanish-America. The pure Indian is found in Brazil only in regions where the white man has not thought it worth while to take possession, and the proportion of Indian blood is much smaller than in surrounding countries. In many localities, evidences of Indian descent are so rare as to be remarkable.
Cabral's voyage was the real discovery of Brazil, if we consider historical and political consequences. It was the first reported to Europe; and the Portuguese Crown immediately made formal claim to the territory. But, as a matter of fact, land which to-day is a part of Brazilian territory had been seen by Europeans before Cabral landed. In January, 1500,Vincente Yanez Pinzon, who had commanded theNiñaon the first voyage of Columbus, saw land in the neigbourhood of Cape St. Roque. Bound westward, he bore away to the west and north, following the prevailing winds and currents as far as the Orange Cape, the present extreme northern limits of Brazil. He was, therefore, the discoverer of the great estuary which forms the mouth of the Amazon. He named it the "Fresh-Water Sea," because the great river freshens the open ocean far out of sight of land, but he did not ascend, nor even see, the river proper. It is also claimed on good evidence that, six months before Pinzon, another Spanish navigator, Alonso de Ojeda, accompanied by Amerigo Vespucci, had made the South American coast not far from Cape St. Roque; and that a month later still another, Diego de Lepe, did the same.
None of these Spanish voyages produced any results. They were not reported until after the news of Cabral's discovery had been solemnly promulgated to the Courts of Europe, and were soon forgotten. The honour of making Brazil known to Europe belongs to Cabral just as certainly as that of discovering America does to Columbus. The Spanish voyages are interesting to antiquarians, but neither they nor the Norwegian voyages of the eleventh century were followed up, or produced any permanent results.
The news reached Portugal in the fall of 1500, and no time was lost in sending out a small fleet to ascertain definitely the extent, value, and resources of the region. The Portuguese hoped to find awealthy and civilised population like that of India—rich and unwarlike nations, such as the Spaniards did encounter a few years later in Peru and Mexico. The exploring expedition was under the command of Amerigo Vespucci, the greatest technical navigator of the age. He shaped his course so as to keep to the windward and south of the redoubtable promontory of St. Roque, which the clumsy ships of that day could not weather in the teeth of the trade-winds and the equatorial current, and, turning to the south, made a systematic examination of the coast nearly as far as the river Plate, employing five months in the task. In naming the rivers, capes and harbours, he saved his inventive faculty and gratified the popular religious sentiment by calling each one by the name of the saint on whose anniversary it was reached. Most of these names have survived. For example, the São Francisco, the largest river between the Amazon and the Plate, is so called because Vespucci reached it on October 1, 1501, which date is sacred to St. Francis in the Roman calendar. Rio de Janeiro is so named because he saw the great bay, whose entrance is narrower than many rivers, on New Year's Day, 1501. He coasted along for two thousand miles, looking eagerly for gold, silver, spices, and civilised inhabitants. He was disappointed. The only thing found which seemed to have an immediate market value was brazil-wood—a dye-wood that had been used in Europe for centuries and was in great demand. Its colour was a bright red—hence its name, which means "wood the colour of fire." It was found insuch abundance that the world's supply has since been drawn from this coast, and among sailors and merchants the country soon became known as "the Country of Brazil-wood." The name almost immediately supplanted "Santa Cruz." Vespucci saw that the country was fertile and the climate pleasant. This was not enough to satisfy his greedy employers. A government whose coffers were beginning to overflow with the profits of the Indian spice-trade and the African mines was not inclined to pay much attention to a region without the precious metals, and inhabited only by naked savages. The reports of the abundance of brazil-wood, however, induced private adventurers to go and cut that valuable commodity. The government declared it a Portuguese monopoly, but the high price of the article made the trade so enormously profitable, that ships of other nationalities, especially French, could not be excluded.
The coast soon became well known, but the Portuguese government did not extend its explorations to the south. It was left to the Spaniards to find the passage into the Pacific Ocean and to explore the tributaries of the Plate. The southern extension of the continent became and remains Spanish. No exact records exist of the earliest Portuguese explorations of the northern coast from Cape St. Roque to the mouth of the Amazon. We only know that some Portuguese ships navigated those waters and that Spain never seriously disputed Portugal's title to that region.
For thirty years Brazil remained unsettled, thoughthe fleets going to the East Indies often stopped in its admirable harbours to refit and take water. Private adventurers came for brazil-wood and the French poached more and more frequently. Soon the latter began to establish little factories to which they returned year after year, and got on good terms with the aborigines. It became evident that Portugal must establish fortified, self-sustaining posts if she expected to retain the territory.
Cabral's discovery bequeathed to the Portuguese race one of the largest, most productive, and valuable political divisions of the globe. The area is 3,150,000 square miles—larger than the United States without Alaska, and surpassed only by the British, Russian, Chinese, and American empires. From north to south it extends 2600 miles, and east and west 2700. Lying across the equator and traversed by no very high mountain ranges, its climate is more uniform than any other equally large inhabited region, but its extent is so immense that there are very considerable variations.
Compact in form, with a continuous seacoast, unsurpassable harbours, and a great extension of navigable rivers, water communication between the different parts is easy and the danger of dismemberment by external attack a minimum. Occupying the central portion of South America it touches all the other countries of the continent except Chile, uniting them geographically, and to a large extent controlling land communication among them. Itis nearer Europe and Africa than any other South American country, and is also on the direct route between the North Atlantic and both coasts of South America. Situated in latitudes where evaporation and precipitation are largest, where the trade-winds unfailingly bring moisture from the Atlantic, and on the eastern and windward slope of the narrowest of the continents, Brazil has the steadiest and most uniformly distributed rainfall of any large part of the globe.
The exuberance of life in Brazil must be seen to be realised. The early voyagers related the wonder and admiration which they felt. Amerigo Vespucci said that if Paradise did exist on this planet it could not be far from the Brazilian coast. Agassiz believed that the future centre of the civilisation of the world would be in the Amazon valley. The plants useful for food, and in industry, commerce, and medicine, are innumerable. Nowhere except in Ceylon does the palm flourish so. There are more plants indigenous to Brazil than to any other country, and many species, like coffee, transplanted there have doubled in productiveness. Indian corn and mandioc were already cultivated by the Indians when Cabral landed, and both upland and lowland rice grew wild. The soil lends itself kindly to any kind of culture, and in most cases two crops may be reaped annually. In a word the subsoil, the soil, the atmosphere, the forests, and the waters of Brazil are teeming with life and full of potential wealth—too much so, perhaps, for the most wholesome development of the human race.
A GARDEN IN PETROPOLIS.A GARDEN IN PETROPOLIS.
The most extensive and the least-developed part of Brazil is the Amazon valley. The Brazilian portion of the Amazon basin comprises forty-five per cent. of the whole territory of the republic. The northern and south-eastern borders slope up to the surrounding mountains, but the rest is an early level plain, little elevated above the sea. The plains are covered with dense forests, much of the country is frequently flooded, and communication is only possible by the streams. In their neighbourhood the climate is in many localities unhealthful, and is everywhere tropical and rainy. Back from the rivers is an unexplored and unknown wilderness. The Amazon with its tributaries forms the greatest of all navigable fluvial systems. Ten thousand seven hundred miles are already known to be suitable for navigation by steamboats, and four thousand eight hundred more for smaller boats.
It is in the narrow coast-plain on the Atlantic, and in the high regions lying to the east and south of the great central depression, that the Brazilian people live.
The main orographical feature of non-Amazonian Brazil is the great mountain system which extends uninterruptedly from the northern coast through the whole country. This continental uplift corresponds to the Andes on the west coast, just as the Apalachians do to the Rockies in North America. Its relative importance is many times greater on account of its great width, and because a broad plateau nearly connects it with the Andes between the headwaters of the Amazon and Plate river systems.The joint result is that two-thirds of Brazil is high enough to have a moderate and healthful climate, but the cataracts in the rivers and the steep escarpments of the mountains make it difficult of access.
The promontory of South America which reaches out to the north-east, looking in a direct line to the western extremity of Africa, is a region of gentle slopes, of wide, sparsely wooded plateaux, and of brush-covered hills. At long intervals, the interior is subject to severe drouths. The soil is fertile as a rule and the rainfall generally sufficient for cereal crops. Nearing the sea precipitation increases, and cotton and sugar thrive. The mountain ranges rarely exceed three thousand feet in height, and lie far back from the coast, from which the country slopes up gradually. This region was the first in Brazil to contain a large population, and the Dutch fought hard for it during the seventeenth century. In its area of 430,000 square miles seven of the Brazilian states are included—Maranhão, Piauhy, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Parahyba, Pernambuco, and Alagoas. The promontory of St. Roque, where the coast turns from an east-and-west direction to a north-and-south, marks a commercial division. Sailing vessels found it difficult to round this cape from the north, and consequently the commercial relations of Maranhão, Piauhy, and Ceará have been rather with the Amazon than southern Brazil. South of St. Roque the region is most easily accessible from Europe and is on the direct line of communication between both sides of the North Atlantic and the coasts to the south.
The region drained by the Tocantins and Araguaya very nearly corresponds with the state of Goyaz. It is the western slope of the Brazilian Cordillera, and differs radically from the Amazonian plain, which it adjoins. As one ascends the Tocantins and Araguaya from their mouths in the Amazon estuary the altitude rapidly rises and navigation is quickly interrupted by cataracts. In the south the level rises to over four thousand feet, and the climate shows a considerable range of temperature, with the thermometer sometimes falling below freezing in the higher mountains. Though the area is 350,000 square miles, the population hardly reaches a quarter of a million, and has not been increasing rapidly since the exhaustion of the alluvial gold deposits. Roughly speaking, it may be described as a region well adapted to cattle and agriculture, and composed of high, open, rolling plateaux traversed by low mountain ranges and well-wooded river valleys.
The next natural division comprises the oval depression lying between the great central watershed and the high range which runs straight north from Rio within a few hundred miles of the coast. This is the São Francisco valley. Politically and commercially connected is the adjacent coast-plain. Valley and plain are divided into the four states of Minas, Bahia, Sergipe, and Espirito Santo, with 430,000 square miles and 6,000,000 inhabitants. In the coast-plain the rainfall is greater than farther north, and the soil is very fertile, producing not only cotton, sugar, and tobacco, but coffee, maize, and mandioc. The slopes are more abrupt and themountains begin closer to the sea. The interior is a great plateau traversed by high mountain ranges and the tributaries of the São Francisco River. Most of this plateau is included in the great state of Minas, the most populous member of the Brazilian union, which is agriculturally self-sufficing, and one of the great mineral regions of the world. The rainfall is abundant, the climate is healthful and bracing, the birth-rate is large, and the region is admirably adapted to the white races. Its general character is a rolling plateau, three to four thousand feet above the ocean, forming extensive, treeless plains, which are interspersed with wooded mountain chains, river valleys, and extensive tracts of brush-land. The European who visits the São Francisco valley is astonished to find a country where the climate is temperate and the soil fitted to the production of all sorts of food crops including the cereals, and where, nevertheless, proximity to the equator makes practicable a multiplicity of crops in a single year. The coast-plain, which forms the greatest part of Bahia, Sergipe, and Espirito Santo, is fertile, but the climate is enervating to Europeans, and the proportion of black blood there is the largest in Brazil.
About the twentieth degree the mountains approach close to the coast, and from Victoria south to the thirtieth degree the Atlantic border of Brazil is steep and mountainous, often rising directly from the sea to a height of two thousand to six thousand feet. It is a coast of splendid harbours and magnificent scenery. The drainage is mostly inland into the Plate system, and water falling within a dozenmiles of the ocean flows 2500 miles before reaching the sea.
To this rule there is but one important exception—the Parahyba River, the basin of which is practically coterminous with the state of Rio de Janeiro and the federal district. This state is commercially and politically very important, although its area is small. The surface is very mountainous and the soil mostly inferior to that of the divisions to the north and south. However, it is still an immense producer of coffee and sugar. Its geographical situation and great harbour have made it the most thickly settled part of the country. The rainfall is very large, especially on the mountains nearest the sea, which are covered with magnificent forests. The coast-plain is warm though not unhealthful, save in the vicinity of the infected city of Rio, and in the higher regions the climate is delightful and in temperature almost European. The northern boundary is the Mantiqueira range which divides the Parahyba basin from the valleys of the Paraná and São Francisco. This range is the highest in Brazil, and its culminating peak—Itatiaya—is ten thousand feet high, though it is only seventy miles from the sea. Slightly lower ranges lie between the Mantiqueira and the ocean, and of these the highest is Pedro d'Assu—7365 feet—which overlooks Rio harbour, only twenty miles away.
The Brazilian portion of the great Paraná valley presents a remarkable uniformity of general characteristics. Bordering the sea is a range of mountains, or rather the abrupt escarpment of the plateau,some three thousand feet high. From its summit the surface slopes gently to the west, draining into the Paraná by a hundred streams, many of which are navigable in their middle courses. This great plateau—with its area of about 250,000 square miles—is mostly treeless toward the north, but in the south is covered with pine forests. It lies in the temperate zone and snow sometimes falls on the higher peaks andchapadasof São Paulo. The soil is remarkably fertile, and this is the coffee regionpar excellenceof the world. A coffee tree in São Paulo produces two to four times as much as in other parts of the globe. Food crops grow well, and the country might be economically independent of the rest of the world. The contour of the country is favourable to railroad-building and the region is easily penetrable. From their settlements on the seaward border of this plateau the Paulistas of the seventeenth century roamed over the whole interior of South America, enslaving the Indians and driving out the Spanish Jesuits. The rainfall diminishes toward the interior, and there is an ill-defined limit where it ceases to be sufficient for coffee. The coffee district is also limited by the lowering of average temperature with increasing latitude. The three states of São Paulo, Paraná, and Santa Catharina contain most of the region under description, but south-western Minas and extreme southern Goyaz also belong to it.
The great plateau gradually dies away to the south ending with a low escarpment across the state of Rio Grand do Sul. Physically and geographically, this State is different from the rest of Brazil. Most of its area is drained by the Uruguay River, and its natural relations and affinities are with the republic of that name. Rio Grande's ninety-five thousand square miles contain over a million inhabitants, and the open, rolling plains, nowhere much elevated above the sea, are excellently adapted to cattle. The northern portion is higher, more broken, and more wooded than the southern, and agriculture has made greater progress. The climate is distinctly that of the temperate zone—hot in summer, cold in winter, and subject to sudden variations on account of the winds which sweep up from the vast Argentine pampas. The inhabitants are big, vigorous, and hardy, and great riders. All the products of the temperate zone, including the cereals, flourish, and this part of Brazil seems destined to great things in the near future.
From Bolivia around to Uruguay sweeps in a great semicircle, convex to the north, a plateau that nearly unites the Andes with the Eastern Cordillera, and forms the watershed between the Amazon and the Plate. Its eastern horn has already been described as forming the states of São Paulo, Paraná, and Santa Catharina; its western and central portions form the great interior state of Matto Grosso. Here the headwaters of the Madeira, Tapajos, and Xingu, tributaries of the Amazon, intertwine with those of the Paraguay and Paraná. The narrow depression which the Upper Paraguay forms across it is the only portion that has yet been described. The rest of the 410,000 square miles of MattoGrosso is abandoned to Indians and wild beasts. Only enough is known of these solitudes to prove that in the centre of the continent exists a well-watered, fertile, and healthful region, capable of sustaining an immense population, but which is shut off from development by lack of means of communication. The northwestern part could be reached from the Amazon if the Falls of the Madeira could be overcome, a route which would also open up a great and now inaccessible portion of Bolivia.