BEAZILIAN COLONIZATION,
FROM AN EUROPEAN POINT OF VIEW,
BY
JACARE ASSU.
LONDON:
EDWARD STANFORD, 6 & 7, CHARING CROSS, S.W r .
1873.
Stack
Annex
JV
7
477
PREFACE
THE facts on which the following reflections on
colonization in Brazil are grounded, have t>een
derived from personal experience, intercourse, and
observation ; from the published treatises of Senhor
Tavares Bastos, and of the German Consul, Her-
mann Haupt, members of a patriotic Brazilian
society for the encouragement of emigration ; from
the work of Herr von Tschudi, formerly Swiss
Minister in Brazil, and from other less important
sources.
BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
SOME people say that it is better to crimp cod-fish,
and that the best way to kill a calf is by bleeding
it to death.
Some people, again, think emigration of English-
men to Brazil advisable. It is easy enough to
understand these assertions, and many similar ones,
and yet to hold a diametrically opposite opinion.
The fact is, so much depends on the point of view.
In the following lines I propose to take my stand
rather with the cod-fish, calves, and colonists, than
with gourmands and colonization agents. Brazil
has been contemplated so often from the rosy point
of view ; people paid and unpaid have at various
times been so fulsomely mendacious on her account;
placards, newspapers, guide-books, and itineraries,
have contained such startling paragraphs often
under the hand of those who ought to have known
better about the marvellous fertility of the empire
and the exceptional advantages it offers, that a
little sober truth becomes more than ever necessary.
And this is especially the case at a moment when
the demand for white labour consequent on the
Slavery Abolition Bill, to say nothing of particular
interests, has given a new stimulus to the emigrant
B 2
4 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
trade. For it is with emigrating as it is with
crimping cod-fish and bleeding calves few con-
stitutions will stand a repetition of the process.
To be once either crimped or emigrated is enough,
or more than enough, for one lifetime. " Emi-
grated " yes, that is the rub. If the advantages
of Brazil, its balmy climate, its deep soil, its mineral
wealth, its warm reception of emigrants, its rigid
adherence to contracts, its sound institutions, and
the affinities of its people for things and minds
Teutonic, were left to spread their light by the
radiating force of truth alone ; if the importation
of whites was restricted to facilitating the transit
and establishment of those who followed that natural
attraction which the means of wealth and happiness
necessarily exercises upon the poor and miserable
without official meddling, subsidizing, or puffing
if these were the conditions of the movement, then
there would, indeed, be nothing to say against it.
But would it then ever take place at all ? As far
as regards the English agricultural labourer, I think
we may answer, " never " ; as it is, he is emigrated,
contracted for at so much a head, caught like a fly
by a pretty paper, tickled by hyperbolical expecta-
tions, hallucinated with visions of an earthly Para-
dise; and thus, addleheaded, dumb-cattle like, re-
liant on others, helpless and exacting, he is shipped
off to the Eldorado to be sold.
The object of the Brazilian is perfectly plain and
BRAZIL S NECESSITY. 5
comprehensible. He wants work done, and has
himself an innate personal aversion to doing it. As
the country develops and old races die, degenerate,
or adopt the same view of labour as himself, he is
compelled to seek fresh blood and sinew. It is
important to him that they should be of the best
suitable and available quality. Accustomed, in a
sense shockingly literal, to look on labour, that is
man, as a commodity, the question of how he gets
it, is one about which he is not likely to be over-
scrupulous. How he has hitherto got it is well
known. Africans were imported, Aborigines were
ransomed that is, bought or stolen. Even now
the " captains of Indians " * illegally constrain the
freedom of the uncivilized natives, as the monstrous
law of contract for services legally does the unwary
immigrant. Of this unscrupulousness in supplying
a sudden demand for human beings, the recruiting
for the last war gave painful instances. It was not
always easy to distinguish a " voluntario da patria "
rallying to the standard from the return of a run-
away slave. That the action of the Brazilian
emigration agents has at times been scarcely more
scrupulous than that of the recruiting officer, the
fate of the emigrant scarcely more enviable than
that of the recruit, has been occasionally too manifest
to European eyes.
* Certain officials on the borders of civilization specially concerned
with the care of the Indians.
6 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION'.
Portuguese still emigrate by thousands to the
land discovered by their forefathers ; bronzed sons
of the volcanic islands, or of the scarcely less burn-
ing plains of Lusitania, good workers, good Catho-
lics, allied in blood and habits, what can be the
objection to them ? A very simple one ; they will
not stop. Many at least go back by the way that
they came, bearing with them the spoil of the
tropics. Pedro Chum bo will venture capital or
strength under the Southern cross, but, in a great
majority of cases, it is only that he may some day
build his palace on the hills of the Tagus or pur-
chase a few acres of his native volcano. The French-
man is no colonist, the Spaniard and Italian merely
peddle in trade or go elsewhere.
AVith an exaggerated notion of the misery of
northern Europe and an erroneous one of the ten-
dency of poverty to moderate men's exigencies, the
Brazilian looked to Alpine valleys and lands washed
by foggy northern seas for the stuff he required.
Doubly disappointed in the results, he coquetted a
little with the Yankee and the Pole in times of their
misfortune, and once in desperation with the Coolie,
but only to return again to the old Boreal source.
From his own point of view, this is at any rate
intelligible; but would it be equally so, that the
Anglo-Saxon should, without once weighing the
costs and profits, play blindly into his hands?
There will always be boors enough tempted to go
NO OPPORTUNITY FOR ENGLISHMEN. 7
on board the gilded galley, as long as one lies in a
British port. It is better to suggest caution before-
hand than afterwards to raise the futile cry, "Que
diable allaient-ils faire dans cette galere ? "
Of all persons, why select for this most tentative
experiment, the Anglo-Saxon, on whose wide choice
of home-ruled domiciles the sun never goes down ?
Between Canada and the Cape, Vancouver's and the
Falklands, New Zealand and the Himalayas, Belize
and Pegu, one would have thought there was suffi-
cient work cut out and elbow-room enough, in all
conscience, for our surplus Islanders, without their
flying laws, religion, rites, and mother-tongue, in
the depths of a damp Sertao.* Sons of an empire
embracing one-third of the surface of the globe, with
a million square miles in Asia, two millions and a
half in Australia, and more than half a million in
North America, what has that of the Southern
cross to do with them? Between eternal ice and
torrid glow, between the level of the condor and
that of the cuckoo, between the chase of the walrus
and that of the wombat, between the cultivation of
orchella and that of the oil-palm, between the pre-
paration of kelp or coffee, let them choose; but
keep together !
Notwithstanding Messrs. Burton and Kingsley
(curious collocation I), the Englishman does suffer in
the tropics, and if, as the former implies, the steam-
* Jungles and backwoods of Brazil.
8 BRAZILIAN COLON IZ AT IOX.
ing woods of the torrid zone are to be the habitation
of the ideal man of the future, that man must be
the Nigger, or at least more allied to the ape than
we are. But if there are men who still have dreams
of sitting under their own palm-trees, smoking their
own fresh-plucked tobacco, have we not tropica 1
lands enough, without trying to graft blackthorn
upon banana, the Saxon on Mulatto or Iberian?
Is not G-uiana equal to vast tracts in Brazil ? Are
there no western Indies waiting a second lease of
life, almost a rediscovery ?
What is it then that has from time to time drawn
troops of our countrymen to the Southern Empire ?
Speculation? placards? or sound information?
British interests or Brazilian ?
Is it the experience of other nations and the fate
of former colonies ?
Here is a list of the colonies of the Empire, pub-
lished by the " Sociedade International cle Immi-
gra9ao," established for the purpose of advancing
the cause of immigration, and brought down to
1866. Since then, a certain number of wealthy
and intelligent Americans from the vanquished
Southern States, and some most unsatisfactory
consignments both from the States and from Eng-
land, complete the list of Brazilian experiences of
colonization at high pressure :
EXPERIENCES OF OTHER COUNTRIES.
Colouias.
Provincias.
Epocas
de sua
fundapao.
1 Nova-Friburgo
2 S. Leopoldo
3 Tres-Forquilha
4 S. Pedro de Alcantara das Torres
5 S. Pedro de Alcantra
6 Rio-NeTo
Eio de Janeiro
E jo-Grande do Sul
Rio-Grande do Sul
Eio-Grande do Sul
Santa Catharina
Parana
1817
1825
1826
1826
1828
1828
7 Itaiahv
Santa Catharina
1835
8 Petropolis
9 Santa Isabel e Vargem-Grande
10 Santa Isabel
11 Nossa Senhora da Piedade
12 Santa-Cruz
Eio de Janeiro
Santa Catharina
Espirito-Santo
Santa Catharina
1846
1845
1847
1847
1849
13 D.Pedro II
14 Monte-Bonito
15 Eincao d'El-Rei
16 Mundo-Novo
17 Blumenau
Eio-Grande do Sul
Eio-Grande do Sul
Eio-Grande do Sul
Eio-Grande do Sul
Santa Catharina
1850
1850
1850
1850
1850
18 D Theresa
Parand
1850
19 D. Francisca
20 Mucury ou Philadelphia
21 Colonias por parceria, em numero de)
37, ja mencionadas /
22 Santa Isabel
Santa Catharina
Espirito-Santo
S. Paulo
Maranhao
1851
1852
1852
1853
Eio-Grande do Sul
1854
24 Silva
Eio-Grande do Sul
1854
25 Superaguy
26 Nossa Senhora do 0'
27 Pe^anha
Paran&
Para
Para
1854
1855
1855
28 Silva
Para
1855
1855
30 Santa Isabel
31 Santa Theresa
32 Perucana
Maranhao
Maranhao
1855
1855
1855
33 Petropolis ..
Maranhao
1855
34 Independencia
Eio de Janeiro
1855
35 Santa Eosa
1855
36 Santa Justa
37 Coroas
Rio de Janeiro
Eio de Janeiro
1855
1855
38 Vallao do Veado
39 Eobillon
Eio de Janeiro
S Paulo
1855
1855
40 Santa Leopoldina
41 Bio-Novo
42 Transylvania
43 Marian te
Espirito-Santo
Espirito-Santo
Espirito-Santo
Rio-Grande do Sul
1856
1856
1856
1856
44 Estrella
Eio-Grande do Sul
1856
45 D Affonso
Santa Catharina
1856
46 Leopoldina . ....
Santa Catharina
1856
47 Sinimbii
Bahia
1857
10 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
Epocas
de sua
48 S Ancrelo
Rio-Grande do Sul
1857
49 SantaMaria da Soledade
50 Nova Petropolis
Rio-Grande do Sul
Rio-Graude do Sul
1857
1858
51 S. Louren9o
52 Engenho-Novo
53 Rio-Pardo
Rio-Grande do Sul
Bahia
Bahia
1858
1859
'. 1860
54 S Dio<*o
Piauhy
i 1860
55 D Pedro II
Rio de Janeiro
i 1860
S Paulo
I860
S Paulo
I860
58 Assun^uy ....
Parana
' 1860
59 Theresopolis
60 Itajahy
Santa Catharina
1860
I860
61 Angelina
Santa Catharina
1860
62 S. Vicente de Paula ....
63 Mont' Alverne
64 Encruzilhada
65 Empreza de Mme. Langendorf
66 Colonia allema
Piauhy
Rio-Grande do Sul
Rio-Grande do Sul
Parana
Santa Catharina
1861
1862
1862
1865
1 1827
' 1844
It is Switzerland that, in the colony of Nova
Fribourgo, founded in 1818-1820, makes the first
sad entry on this list.
Nova Fribourgo, with its broad, silent plaza ; the
white houses, backed by grey hills of noble form ;
the green, planted round with Araucarias and
arborescent Bougainvillea ; with its church and
Camara, with its President and Yereadores, with
its judges and delegados, with its police and na-
tional guard, the organized municipality exists at
this day, and looks forward, by reason of its new
railroad station, to a brilliant future ; but of the
Swiss who first broke ground there, a few scattered
families in or round the town are the only repre-
sentatives.
EXPERIEXCES OF SWITZERLAND. 11
Five thousand volunteered in Bern, a part only
of whom left Switzerland. Owing to delays and
other circumstances, including fevers caught in
Holland, but 2006 of these sailed from the ports
of Eotterdam and Amsterdam ; only 1682 reached
the marshy foot of the Serra do Mar, in which
deadly region it had pleased the Brazilian Govern-
ment to fix their first temporary bivouac. Thirty-
one died in the hospital of Macuco; of the thin
remnant that reached the site of the colony, 146
followed in the course of a month, mostly from the
effects of sufferings in the swamps below.*
The struggle with that kind of tropical luxuriance
which grows by sunlight and water alone, and the
attempt to conjure something better out of the
decomposed granite, soon exhausted the lives or
patience of the mass of the survivors, so that, in
short, the present municipality is no more Swiss
than South Sea Island.
Not that all these good people merely served to
make the grass a little ranker here and there in odd
places of the district. A number, when they could
not stand it any longer, got rid of their lots as best
they might, and escaped. With the persistent in-
dustry, patience, probity, and tenacity of their
countrymen, not a few, or their immediate descend-
ants, worked themselves up to a position of ease,
nay, even of wealth. At the present day the
* * The number is given smaller by one authority, i. e., 123 in 16
months.
12 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
vicinity of Cantagallo has descendants- of several of
the survivors of the abandoned colony as well-to-do
local Fazendeiros (planters), and there are names held
good on Rio Exchange for exceptionally large sums
which occurred on that obliterated list of immi-
grants. But it required tough constitutions and stub-
born characters indeed to ensure these successes of
the second generation. The colony itself was predes-
tined to failure from its first conception. Credulous
Mr. G-achet, the Swiss agent, who negotiated with
Zoao YI., probably little thought, when land in the
fertile district of Cantagallo was stipulated, that the
selection would fall on spots where wastes of hungry
fern and slopes of granite grit take up so large a
portion of the surface. Nor could he foresee that
the promised seeds and cattle would be forthcoming
only in the scantiest doles, or even sometimes not
at all.
When a fire gets low we put more wood on it ; a
dying colony wants more precious fuel to wake it
up. In 1823 Messrs. Kretschmar and Schofer pro-
cured a fresh holocaust of 342 victims for Nova
Fribourgo. They had embarked in Europe trusting
to contracts which ensured them fertile lands on the
rivers Caravellas and Vigoso. Arrived in Rio, after
180 days of the brig * Argos,' there was, as may be
imagined, little difficulty in marching them off to the
sterile heights of New Fribourg ; they were meek
enough by that time, and resistance under such cir-
EXPERIENCES OF SWITZERLAND. 13
curastances vain at any. Though connected with a
Swiss colony, this last batch of beings was composed
of Germans.
Things reached such a pitch in the various Swiss
colonies in Brazil, and especially the system of
parceria, or Metayer, under which many citizens of
the Confederation were engaged, gave rise to so
many abuses, that, in 1857, the Federal Government
were induced to send out a minister, in the person of
the well-known and distinguished J. von Tschudi,
to examine into the state of the case. Mr. von
Tschudi was not the man to sit in Rio and judge
from hearsay ; he came to his conclusions on f he sites
of the colonies themselves. In the province of
Espirito Santo, he found the soil and situation of the
colonies for the most part bad ; that the surveying
engineers in some cases pocketed their salaries and
contented themselves with eye measurements, and
that the Directors had been usually unfit persons,
sometimes rogues. In the colony of Santa Leo-
poldina, no one single colonist had obtained his
proper share of land. All the soil is spoken of as
inferior, and the Swiss minister says, that at the
period of his visit, in 1860, there was not a single
family so situated as to be able to support life out
of the produce of their allotment. The invariable
answer from the colonists, to his inquiries, of how
they were getting on, was, " schlecht sehr schlecht."
One man told him he had done much better with
14 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
six groschen (Id.) in Germany than with four
patacs in Brazil. These complaints were no doubt,
as Tschudi admits, often exaggerated, sometimes
unfounded ; but however much be skimmed off on this
account, there will always be a very foul remainder ;
hard facts which no fumes of argument can dis-
sipate.
Another Swiss colony in Espirito Santo, visited
on this occasion, was of that Rio Novo, the creation
of Major Dias da Silva and Co. Its foundation had
likewise been preceded by the usual rosy pamphlet ;
portions of already cultivated land had been promised,
with houses ready built, &c., and there had been
alluring estimates added, showing in figures the
nourishing future assured to happy colonists. All
falsehood and delusion, the most fortunate part of
which is that they failed on this occasion to deceive
many. Still twelve Swiss families are, from a Swiss
point of view at least, more than a trifle after all.
Tschudi characterizes the complaints of the colonists
with which he was greeted in this place as an end-
less representation of knaveries, violence, injustice,
and lies.
Though this miserable colony at least was situated
on good soil in a fairly healthy locality, between the
rivers Itapoana and Rio Novo, the colonists found
on arrival that the virgin woods still stood up in all
their glory, and that the previous cultivation spoken
of in the advertisement had been a simple bait for
EXPERIENCES OF SWITZERLAND. 15
simple folk. As Major Bias da Silva lied himself
into the scrape, so he hoped to lie himself out of it.
He endeavoured to excuse himself on the ground of
not being prepared ! But this very fact, brought
forward in extenuation, was itself a formidable count
of the indictment, and his appeal to it all the more
barefaced, that he had six months previously pro-
fessed, through his agents, that he had already made
the necessary preparations for from thirty to forty
families.
Mr. Tschudi found it his duty to make represen-
tations to the central Government, respecting the
wretched state of the colony of Santa Leopoldina,
and at the very time he was doing so, beheld its
condition described in official reports as regular, and
its future depicted as flattering.
Some of the most painful experiences of the Swiss
are to be found among the parceria, or Metayer,
settlements of Sao Paolo.* Most of these were
visited in detail by Mr. Tschudi, who may be so far
regarded as an impartial witness, that he was
actually accused in the German press of having
accepted bribes from the Fazendeiros to represent
their case favourably. He finds that there existed
faults and just causes of complaint on both sides, as
no doubt there were; but as the object of this
inquiry is not to bring an indictment against
* There were also parceria establishments in the Province of Rio de
Janeiro in 1855.
16 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
Brazilian landowners, but rather impartially to
determine the facts concerning past emigration to
that country for future guidance, we may really
hurry by all such defence as is based on recrimina-
tion. An admirer of the system of parceria in
principle, the Swiss envoy nevertheless comes to
the conclusion that the evil influences and cankerous
abuses under which it is liable to suffer in Brazil
are so fatal that he cannot advocate it in that
country (Tschudi's Reise, vol. iii., page 259).
In Sergipe, Bahia, Alagoas, Pernambuco, &c.,
arrangements on the Metayer principle have long-
existed. Especially in the sugar districts of Brazil
the proprietors of the soil allow settlers (usually
Brazilians) to occupy and cultivate patches of land,
bringing their cane to the Fazendeiro's mill, and
receiving one-half of the sugar produced. These
squatters are called Lavradores. There is another
peculiar kind of labour trade carried on with indi-
gent Portuguese and Islanders, brought out on specu-
lation by captains of ships sailing to Brazil. These
penniless individuals are ransomed from the captains
by Fazendeiros on the look-out for hands, and in
order to purchase their release from the ships they
agree to serve any landowners who advance the
amount of their debts to the skipper, till they have
repaid the expenses of their journey. This they
usually succeed in doing in about two years, during
which time they are treated much as the blacks.
EXPERIENCES OP SWITZERLAND. 17
They often, however, remain on after they are free,
working by agreement for wages. Being of the
Latin race, they are both less exigent of comforts,
and on a better footing of mutual understanding with
their employers than could ever be hoped for in the
case of Teutonic labourers.
The first attempt to apply this system on a large
scale to Europeans, was made by the well-known
Senator Vergueiro, in 1841, with ninety Portu-
guese families an experiment which failed com-
pletely, in consequence of political tumults in the
province. It was however renewed in 1846 with
Germans, and appears, by all accounts, to have been
a fair success. But after Senator Vergueiro came
his son Jose, a very different sort of man, who
undertook, besides meeting the demand for labour
on his own fazendas, to furnish European labourers
for his neighbours, to whom the total abolition of
the slave trade, which occurred about 1850, had
made the question of supply one of increasing em-
barrassment. No less than thirty-seven estates
obtained labourers in this manner, so that in 1857
the total number of Europeans employed on them
had reached 3600.
By the conditions of these latter contracts, accord-
ing to the reasonable interpretation put on them, the
colonists had to be received and brought to the place
of destination by the Company Vergueiro, and receive
from them all that they required, including provisions,
18 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
until able to provide for themselves. Each father of
a family was to have as many coffee-trees alloted to
him as he could undertake the charge of, and like-
wise a proper piece of land for the purpose of grow-
ing articles of food. On the other hand, the
colonists were bound to repay all sums supplied to
or for them, whether for the journey, food, or other
advances, with an interest of 6 per cent, from the
day of payment ; and to this end were bound to
make over to their employer at least one-half of
each year's earnings. By a provision, moreover,
that gave rise to much misery, the entire family was
held individually responsible for the whole amount
of its debts to the planter and agents. All the
colonists believed, furthermore, that the expenses of
the land journey to their final destination would, by
their interpretation of the contract, be borne by the
Company, and were painfully surprised when the
cost of their support in Santos, and during fourteen
or more days' land journey, was entered as an item
on their accounts. Finally, they had to pay rent
for their houses, and, on Yergueiro's estate, to give
up half the produce of their garden allotments to
help to clear off their debt.
Hard as were many of the above conditions, had
they been loyally, leave alone liberally, carried out,
they would never have brought matters to the ex-
tremities at which they arrived. But, besides these
burdens on the emigrants, Jose Vergueiro levied
EXPERIENCES OP SWITZERLAND. 19
head mail in the shape of a commission of $10
per adult (l.), and $5 per child, not only on
those colonists he procured for other estates, but
on those he obtained for himself! Nay, even for
the dead that perished on the way, a commission
was charged and carried with interest to the ac-
count of the survivors. This interest at 6 per cent,
was charged on every advance, whether in money or
kind, and sometimes on advances made by the Swiss
communes for the journeys of their citizens, under
the special understanding that they were to be free
from interest. The colonists, moreover, often com-
plained of the largeness of the measures used to
estimate their coffee crops ; of the shortness of the
weights employed on the settlement stores from
which they obtained their supplies ; of their coffee
(Fazenda Independencia) being calculated at too
low a figure their purchases too high; of their
plots of land being too far from their dwellings to
be useful ; of an insufficient number of trees or of
old trees being given over to them, with a view to
delaying their emancipation ; of the farce of arbi-
tration by local Brazilian authorities in matters of
dispute, and sometimes of intimidation and brutality
on the part of the directors of these settlements. Per-
haps, however, the most revolting part of these agree-
ments was the fact that the colonists might be passed
on from one fazenda or estate to another, with their
debts, like any other transferable or negotiable article.
c 2
20 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION'.
Often, no doubt, the complaints were exagge-
rated or altogether unfounded; still, enough of
rigid fact, both in the conditions themselves and
the mode in which they were carried out, remains
to account for the outbreaks which finally occurred
among the colonists, first in the State of Nova
Olinda, and finally on Vergueiro's own property,
Ibicaba. The latter occurred in 1856, and was a
regular appeal to arms. Had it not been for the
tact and prudence of those who endeavoured to
restore order, not excepting Vergueiro himself,
the small body of Brazilian soldiers present might
have made a very awkward acquaintance with the
descendants of the men of Laupen and St. Jaques.
The crisis was the more perilous since the discon-
tented denizens of other neighbouring establishments
were only awaiting the issue at Ibicaba to follow
suit. In both cases the rioters were all Swiss, a
sense of discipline or other motives keeping the
Germans in the background. The colonists of
Nova Olinda were removed to Espirito Santo by
the Government, and commissions of inquiry were
appointed to examine the complaints; but the
scandal after a short time became, notwithstanding,
notorious enough to affect the trade. After 1857
no more parceria colonists came from those countries
which had furnished them hitherto ; altogether, far
fewer were introduced, and these no longer through
the hands of Yergueiro and Co.
Many of the colonists took nine years to pay their
EXPERIENCES OF SWITZERLAND. 21
debts. A loyal attention to the spirit of their agree-
ment would have, and in many cases did, shorten
this period considerably ; so that Mr. Tschudi, at
the time of his journey in 1861, found a fair pro-
portion of hard-working emigrants already free;
still, notwithstanding these happier examples, the
condition of many emigrants became one of hopeless
serfdom. Colonists who attempted to run away
were seized, and suffered to linger in the provincial
prisons, and as late as 1806 there were families
whose debts, contracted in 1853, were not yet
liquidated ! What contributed not a little to this
prolongation of bondage was the disgraceful con-
duct of Vergueiro. This company had bound
itself to repay the communes from which the emi-
grants were obtained the amount of passage and
other moneys advanced to their countrymen, and
for this purpose received, either directly from the
colonists, or indirectly through the .planters to
whom they had been made over, various sums ot
money towards the gradual extinction of their debt.
Many communes, taking pity on the hard lot of
their children, and perceiving what a very different
matter the task of achieving independence really
proved to what they had been led to anticipate,
graciously remitted the debts due to them with a
view to hastening the day of freedom. But Senhor
Vergueiro, into whose hands these sums* had mean-
* This payment into the hands of Vergueiro often took place on the
occasion of the transfer of the emigrants to other hands.
22 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
while passed, deliberately confiscated them to the
amount of some 180,000 francs, for his own use, to
indemnify himself, as he alleged, for the results of
the revolt of Ibicaba, and for the loss he had sus-
tained by the many unserviceable (halt and maimed)
individuals which the communes had supplied !
Though the existence of a certain proportion of
decrepid and vagabond individuals in the various
batches of colonists does not testify to the good
faith or good sense of the communes, which had
thus sought to be rid of their bad stock, the fact
cannot possibly be tortured into an excuse for rob-
bing the innocent and robust. In general, however,
it is to the bad class of colonists selected, including
many disreputable, vagabond, and infirm individuals,
that Mr. von Tschudi attributes the most crying
evils of these Metayer enterprises of Sao Paolo,
and bad as were the conditions, and sometimes the
execution of the contracts, industrious, steady fami-
lies did certainly in time work themselves free and
purchase land of their own. Nor is it so much the
conduct of the proprietors of the land (who, with a
few exceptions, seem to have adhered pretty closely,
if sometimes harshly, to the terms of their bond),
but rather the altogether vicious nature of the pact
itself, which is mainly answerable for the evil. The
Fazendeiros naturally looked closely after their own
interests, but such men as Yisconde de Baependy,
de Souza Barros, Texeira de Nogueira, and Senhor
EXPERIENCES OF SWITZERLAND. 23
Caraargo were not likely to be either grasping or
inhumane ; while many were the acts of benevo-
lence for which the emigrants had to thank the
kindness natural to so many Brazilians.
The trial was bound to fail. Whatever may be
said in favour of the Metayer system in the abstract,
its adoption as the basis of the relations between
the Brazilian landlord and the G-erman emigrant
seeking an Eldorado, was an experiment the results
of which were not hard to foretell. The principle is
only half the experiment; the matter is equally
important. Plants, for instance, may no doubt be
successfully grafted on one another, not therefore
the cabbage on the cactus. From its very nature
the Metayer system, if it is to result in justice and
satisfaction to both parties, requires a basis of
mutual comprehension and confidence, a condition
which, in the countries where it has been more or
less successful, has been the work of traditional
custom, dating from immemorial time. If, when
there is identity of local origin, race, customs, and
religion, the tenant is still, as we know really hap-
pens, not unfrequently left to the clemency of the
landlord for the means of subsistence, what are we
to expect where none of these elements show the
smallest affinity, and the relation is inaugurated
with grounds for mutual suspicion and disappoint-
ment ? Men who seek to better their condition by
emigration are not in any case likely to be contented
24 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
with labouring as bond-servants for years on a soil
which they can never hope to call their own. But
instead of starting free, even under these circum-
stances, the parceria colonists commence their new
existence under an incubus of debt, incurred for
their passage and other expenses, from which the
weakest struggle in vain to get clear. The fact
that this state of serfdom for debt is voluntarily
assumed does little to diminish its painful and dis-
heartening character. It was with a sense of the
inadvisability of such conditions that the North
American Republic forbad, in 1864, all contract
engagements of the service of emigrants for more
than a year in payment of the costs of their impor-
tation. Philosophers may say what they like, but
men do require protection from themselves, espe-
cially when hungry. If Beelzebub in full satanicals
were actually to open a bureau at Hyde Park
Corner for the purchase of souls, it would, after the
first half-hour's shyness, be crowded from morning
till night. Unfortunately, no law prevented the
engagements of the half-crop colonists of Sao Paolo,
and a member of the Sociedade Internacional de
Iminigra^ao, Mr. H. Haupt, the German consul in
Rio, could in 1867 report no better of them than that
" the greater part of the colonists of Sao Paolo are
irremediably enslaved by the system of parceria,
notwithstanding the many sacrifices made by those
European communities to which they belonged to
EXPERIENCES OF SWITZERLAND. 25
effect their liberation from these contracts." Like
the Greek agricultural population of the time of
Solon, the unfortunate emigrants became something
very like slaves of their creditors, having no hope
short of a Seisachtheia. Thus the Government has
in some instances been compelled to obtain the free-
dom of the colonists from their engagements, and to
remove them to new centres, bringing, by these
measures, some relief to their distress; but the
example remains none the less prominent as a
warning.
The -case of a Mr. Eobillard, indeed, shows that
even when both the nature of the contract and the
personality of the proprietor were as favourable as
possible to the emigrants, they might still, under a
like or analogous system, become their own enemies,
and work out nothing but ill blood and loss to both
contracting parties. Mr. Robillard was no Brazilian
slaveholder, and all the objectionable clauses alluded
to above were wanting in his contracts. On his
coffee estate at Ubatuba, he settled eight families
of Fribourgeois Swiss, allowing them free lodging
and garden land, and in every way liberal condi-
tions. To the care of each family were made over
as many coffee-trees as it could take charge of, for
which they were expected to pay rent at the rate
of $50* a year per 1000 trees. Mr. von Tschudi,
from whom this case is cited, estimates that
* About 57.
26 BRAZILIAN COLOXIZATIOX.
each family could, with reasonable industry, have
obtained from this source alone, after payment of all
rent, an income of from $400 to $600 per annum.*
But so little did the colonists fulfil their part of the
bargain, that during the five years in which Mr.
Eobillard's patience endured their presence, they
never paid him one penny for the trees, and when
at length he decided to get rid of them at any price
making them in fact a present of 550. of debts
they cut up and injured the plantation?, and indig-
nantly complained to the Swiss envoy of the treat-
ment they had received.
I mention this, because whilst showing none the
less the vice apparently inherent in the system of
tenant colonies in Brazil as far as yet tested, it
proves that there is an altera pars, when blame
is discussed, who may have a good deal to say.
But a fight is none the less a fight because both
parties break their heads in it, and the question of
" Who's to blame ? " is not the one with which we
are now most immediately concerned.
Thus much of Switzerland's experiences. There
are Swiss settled in other colonies, and Swiss every-
where, and with the energy, frugality, patience, and
plain sense of their race, there are very many that
are doing well; but it is rather in spite of, than
thanks to, their circumstances, and even thus only
a portion passed out unscathed from the gauntlet
of troubles and privations.
* 401. to (501, or more.
EXPERIENCES OF SAVOYARDS. 27
I have said that Italians and French appear o
have been in general exempted from furnishing the
material for these numerous experiments ; there are,
however, some exceptions. First, I will cite the
case of some former subjects of the King of Italy,
now citizens of France, selected in 1855-6, for the
most cruel holocaust of all.
It must always be remembered that terms that
read fairly well by the dim light of the north, when
they get the Tropic sun to shine on them, spell
nothing but misery and semi-starvation. Mindful
of this, we can understand how the following condi-
tions proposed by a Portuguese speculator, at once
found at the foot of the Alps .abundant subscribers,
who, if they could have interpreted them by the
light of their after experience, would have very
much preferred eating them, and perhaps the pro-
poser likewise.
These conditions, according to Consul Haupt,
were :
1. Engagements for three years.
2. Lodging and food gratis.
3. Salary of 300 francs a year.
4. Victuals to be stopped in case of illness, and
medical attendance to be at the cost of the sick.
5. The right reserved to the agent to transfer
their services to anyone else.
To say nothing of the extreme vagueness of the
expressions " food and lodging," especially in the
eyes of a speculator in human flesh, the task of
28 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION".
supplying themselves with clothes at South Ame-
rican prices, and paying the doctor's bill in the
climate of the Brazilian capital and its suburbs,
soon taught these poor fellows that the value of
money is a very relative matter indeed. But this
was far from all ; there remained to their consignees
the right to transfer them hither and thither as
might appear most profitable, and, in acting upon
this right, the authors of such a scheme were not
likely to be embarrassed with fond hygienic con-
siderations in carrying it out. Nor were they.
After working, by way of introduction to their new
fatherland, on the Tijuca railroad, that is, along a
line of country stretching from the foot of the serra
of Tijuca to Eio, where the sun is usually powerful
enough to addle a head of brass, they were removed
to the marshes of Belem, to labour in the construc-
tion of another railroad, that of Dom Pedro II.
This latter runs at first through the deadly regions
of plains and swamps which intervene between
serra and sea in most tropical American countries.
Under the circumstances, the majority of the new
workmen stout, sinewy fellows still did the only
thing that could have been expected of them, drove
their picks and mattocks bravely for a space, and
then laid them away for ever. One by one, the
gang of mountaineers sank into the soil they were
turning ; but, unfortunately, not before they had
suffered an anguish of depression from the heavy
EXPERIENCES OF FRANCE. 29
air, such as only those can appreciate who have
breathed both it and the free breezes of the Alps.
It appears that in this way all but a thin remnant
of the venture were used up, so that it can scarce
have paid sufficiently to tempt the scandal of a
repetition with such perishable wares. And now
looking, as they often must, from vsome gap in the
serra on the shroud of deadly mist that wraps the
uncongenial resting-places of these mountaineers,
and watching, here and there, those uneasy heavings
of its broad surface that come with the first morn-
ing air, do no Brazilians ever think they see the
wraiths of these deluded Savoyards arising to claim
vengeance on the land that suffered them to be thus
immolated ? No Brazilian does : but the Erinnyes
know better.
In 1850, a French doctor, of some reputation, of
the name of Faivre, founded a colony entirely com-
posed of his countrymen on the river Ivahy, in the
province of Parana. It received considerable pecu-
niary assistance from the State, but was left without
roads, and being situated a long way from any
market and from the coast, it never prospered, and
is now almost entirely dispersed. Besides this
nucleus, there were a few French Alsatians in Nova
Petropolis, and here and there a couple in other
colonies, in Joinville, Santa Cruz, S. Angelos,
Superaguy, and Santa Leopoldina. Finally, Mr.
Robillard, of whom we have already spoken, was
30 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
himself a Frenchman, and included some compa-
triots in his unsuccessful experiment above alluded
to. This is, I believe, the entire extent to which
France has contributed to replenishing the wilds of
Brazil, and her people may on the w r hole congra-
tulate themselves.
Holland is, as far as I know, only interested to
the amount of a few families, in Joinville and Rio
Novo, 13 in Theresopolis of Santa Catharina, 59 in
Nova Petropolis of Rio Grande, 201 in Santa Maria
da Solidade, and in the very questionable settle-
ment of Santa Leopoldina, in Espirito Santo, of
which mention has already been made. In the
latter there were a few years ago 200 Dutchmen.
They appear to have had to pay high for their land
in this ill-situated colony; their houses, duly pro-
vided according to their contracts, came down for
the most part on their heads, no less than thirteen
directors were inflicted on them in ten years, and
eight years after the establishment of the colony the
Protestant inhabitants had neither chapel, school,
nor clergyman.
Belgium chiefly derives her experiences from a
colony on the Itajahy, in the province of Santa
Catharina. It was founded in 1844, by Major von
Lede, with 122 individuals. It did not get on,
some colonists went back, and at one time the settle-
ment was nearly abandoned. Poverty and neces-
sity seem, however, to have done what State nurture
EXPERIENCES OF BELGIUM, TYROL, AXD PORTUGAL. 31
in so many instances failed to effect. The Major's
funds came to an end. The remaining emigrants
consequently found they had to buckle to in good
earnest; and thus left to its own energies, the
little community seems to a certain extent to have
recovered. Some G-ermans were added, to replace
those who had returned to Europe, and a few years
ago the colony appeared to be doing well. A cer-
tain number of Belgians were sent to Joinville, but
they were a sorry troop, and few remained. There
are fourteen Belgians in Sad Angelo of Rio Grande,
and others in Rio Novo and in Santa Cruz of the
same province. The only other Belgian enterprise
of this kind which I am aware of is the project of
Sefihora von Langendorf to establish a colony on
the Serra Negra, in Assunguy, Parana. I know
nothing of its results. Like the French and Italians
the Belgians may be found sporadically among
settlements of other nations.
The motley colony of Santa Leopoldina formerly
contained seventy Tyrolians, who are better off than
their neighbours, except in so far as they are
Catholics.
Of the Portuguese, besides the regular influx, so
much of which as we have seen flows back and
besides the numbers brought out by speculation of
various kinds and distributed among the fazendas
there have been regular colonies at different intervals.
But, though one might have expected to find at least
32 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
the countrymen of Cabral at home and flourishing, the
Portuguese nuclei give so little encouragement that
it can scarce be doubted that the inhabitants of the
mother-country are much better left to find their
own way out to Brazil and their own place when
there. As navvies, stonecutters, artizans, they find
no difficulty in establishing themselves, and set a
praiseworthy example of honest work ; as colonists
they do not appear to satisfy either themselves or
their sponsors much better than other nations. Thus
we have Santa Isabel of Maranhao, founded in 1853,
Nossa Senhora de 0' in Para, dating from 1854,
Sinimbii and Engenho Novo, of 1859, in Bahia, all
of Portuguese, or with some admixture of natives,
and all, more or less, complete failures, the Portu-
guese slinking away. Again, in 1855, a parceria
attempt with Portuguese was made in Maranhao.
Nine hundred and eleven were distributed over six
stations, a number which, in 1857, had sunk to 359,
and has since dwindled still more. The late Baron
de Nova Fribourgo also obtained but poor results
with the Portuguese; an eloquent testimony see-
ing that here race, language, customs, and religion
were alike of the indubitable something rotten in
the application of this system in Brazil.
As to Spaniards, they are likely to resort to the
country when caterpillars colonize ants' nests, and
owls foxes' earths. Besides, they have yet a fail-
island or so of their own, when they feel restless,
EXPERIENCES OF GERMANY. 33
without troubling either their secular enemies or
their own unnatural children.
We have now come to the country that has by
far the greatest interest in the question of Brazilian
emigration, and whose participation in it has at
length reached proportions to which historical im-
portance can no longer be denied. This country is
Germany, with whose sons the earliest regular at-
tempt at colonization, after that of Nova Fribourgo,
was made in 1825, at Sao Leopoldo, in the province
of Rio Grande. In 1850 the total number of per-
sons, of all nationalities, in all the colonies of the
empire was estimated at 18,760 souls (Tavares
Bastos). In 1860 the German population of the
municipality of Sao Leopoldo alone counted 12,500
inhabitants ; while Mr. von Tschudi, at the time of
his visit, estimated the additional numbers, which
had spread from this place over the province (of Sad
Pedro de Rio Grande do Sul) at between 16,000 and
18,000. At the present day the Teutonic element is
42,789 strong in that province ; and the total number
of Germans in Brazil about 77,000 souls. This north-
ern stock has been implanted in the following distinct
nuclei, most of which are almost entirely German :
Sao Leopoldo, in Rio Grande founded 1824-5
Tres Forquilhas, in Rio Grande 1826
SaS Pedro de Alcantara das Torres, in Rio Grande 1826
Sao Pedro de Alcantara, in Santa Catharina .. .. 1827-8
Rio Negro, founded with disbanded German soldiers |
but dwindfed away almost to nothing, in Province > 1828
of Parana
34 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
Petropolis, Eio de Janeiro founded 1846
Santa Isabel, in Santa Catharina 1845
Santa Isabel, in Espirito Santo 1847
Nossa Senhora da Piedade (wound up as a failure),"* , g .
in Santa Catharina /
Santa Cruz, in Rio Grande 1849
Rincao del Re of Germans from S. Leopoldo, in Rkn ,0^
Grande / "
Mundo Novo, in Rio Grande .. 1850
Blumenau, in Santa Catharina 1850
Dona Francesca, in Santa Catharina 1851
Mucury, in Minas Geraes 1852
In many of the thirty-seven parceria colonies, in) Ig g 2
Conventos, in Rio Grande 1854
In Independencia and other fazendas on the parcerial , g55
system, in Rio de Janeiro / "
Santa Leopoldina, in the Province of Espirito Santo 1856
Rio Novo, probably only a few Germans, in thel I85r
Province of Espirito Santo J "
Estrella, four Bavarians, in the Province of Rio Grande 1856
Transylvania, in the Province of Espirito Santo .. 1856
Sao Angelo, in the Province of Rio Grande . . . . 1857
Santa Maria da boca do Monte, founded by S."i if;7
Leopoldo colonists, in the Province of Rio Grande/
Santa Maria da Soledade, or Montravel, in the\ 1ft c 7
Province of Rio Grande / "
Nova Petropolis, including, I believe, Santa Theresa j ir;
on the Cahy, in the Province of Rio Grande .. f
SaS Louren?o, in the Province of Rio Grande .. 1858
Theresopolis of Santa Catharina, in the Province of I -iocr\
RioGVande /
Dom Pedro II., or Juiz da Fora, in Minas, in the\ 1Q
Province of Rio Grande /
Itajahy, in the Province of Santa Catharina . . . . 1860
Taquary, or Teutonia, private colony founded by)
German merchants, in the Province of Rio Grande I 1860
Assuuguy, Parana j
In all 30 colonial centres, besides the numerous
Metayer settlements in Sao Paolo and Rio de
Janeiro.
Cahy, of which I also find mention among my
papers, is probably Santa Theresa, on the Cahy
EXPERIENCES OP GERMANY. 35
Covitiba. A few of the above colonies, as Estrella
for instance, have very few German inhabitants;
and there are, no doubt, odd Germans in others
not mentioned, besides which there are some 2000
in the town of Eio de Janeiro, and others scat-
tered through the country.
Whether, now, we look at its extent, its early
date and persistent recurrence ; to numbers, to the
energy of race, or to the results obtained, the
German colonization of Brazil is by far the most
important attempt yet made to populate that
country by Europeans other than the owners, and
constitutes a phenomena of no small historical signi-
ficance.
As to the results, they are the fairest, and the
future of these settlements is the most hopeful in
all that dark calendar of error, recklessness, and
speculation.
Above all, it would seem that German coloniza-
tion, at whatever cost, has finally taken root as a
living fact, likely to bear fruit in due season, and is
no longer washed backwards and forwards on the
uncertain current of experiment. Twenty or thirty
years ago, the life of a German labouring man was
not what it now is, or is fast becoming. Small
states had stern laws, and, in the larger ones,
multitudinous restrictions gave little room for free
expansion. Trade, throttled in its mediaeval swath-
ing-clothes, was often dull, prices and wages low,
D 2
36 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
manufactures, iu some states, in something like to
infancy ; thereto came political dissensions, military
service, bad harvests, with hunger-typhus in the
rear ; so that a poor man might well come, and that
not seldom, to feel pinched. Thus the devil drove ;
the desire of those who ruled the councils of Brazil
to replenish their land opened a way. After the
formal denunciation, followed, about 1850, by the
practical suppression of the slave trade, this dilet-
tante desire became an imperative necessity; hence-
forward agents were constantly at hand in Europe,
with all their paraphernalia of puffs, placards, and
pamphlets, to assist the harassed German in his
attempt to escape a bitter present, to allure him
with sunny pictures of the future.
In sooth it was a real case of needs must, and
the two necessities played perfectly into each other.
Ship after ship disembarked its human cargo, colony
followed colony into the bowers of the Eldorado.
Now the lot fell on slopes of scarped granite ; now
in the recesses of some fertile nook ; now on some
breezy albeit barren heights; now in the choke-
damp of some matted wood; now the auspices
were taken by a nobler enthusiast; now all de-
pended on some lord of nigger hordes. Petropolis
and Santa Leopoldina, Juiz da Fora and Mucury,
Blumenau and Angelica, all had their turn, and
some their victims, but still the German emigration
flowed on. As a bare rock surface over which the
EXPERIENCES OP GERMANY. 37
water trickles, nothing seems to hold, nothing to
flourish on it. But let at length but one chance
seed catch in an inequality, lodge on a vantage-
ground, and the inhospitality even of that blank
surface is vanquished, an oasis is formed. Plenty
of reinforcements and the impossibility of retreat
will carry any position. Contracts proved false,
authorities partial, soils barren, climates lethal,
measurements faulty, payments slack, sympathies
scanty, laws and religion alien, while the labourer
savoured no sweeter than elsewhere ; but German
discontent still drove, German industry and German
frugality survived this and more ; until at last, for
weal or woe, this race seems to have really won a
footing in the country.
One great element in the comparatively satis-
factory results which have attended German colo-
nization is the fortunate locality in which half of
the settlements have been established, namely, the
temperate and congenial province of Rio Grande.
Santa Catharina and Parana also boast well-to-do
colonies; and but a few experiments have been
made in the altogether unsuitable lowlands of the
tropics.
But it is our duty, while gladly marking the
flecks of green which at last brighten the rock, to
note the waste of seed that drifted nowhere; the
starved growth that sprung up only to wither.
German experience would form a catalogue of all
38 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
the ills of Brazilian colonization, ills which are
summed up elsewhere. It was the enlightened
desire of Dom Pedro I. to establish German colonies
in Brazil, that led to the earliest importation of
that nationality, consisting of 126 individuals.
These arrived in 1824, and were shortly followed
by others, so that by 1830 the total number had
reached 4856 souls. These colonists were esta-
blished in a favourable locality on the Rio dos
Sinas in Rio Grande, on a spot where a royal
establishment for the culture of hemp and flax had
formerly been situated. The lands were given
gratuitously, and in addition the settlers received
an allowance of 320 reis a day per person for the
first, 160 reis for the second year, besides seeds,
implements, and cattle. Thus originated the now
celebrated, and, after many vicissitudes, un-
doubtedly successful colony of Sao Leopoldo, at
present a district with a municipal town alone
numbering 3000 souls, and a centre of the highest
importance to the future of colonization and of the
province. From the very first there were com-
plaints of the measurements of the allotments, and
forty years later there were colonists without
proper titles to their lands; at times, too, the
direction of the colony, especially in the days of
one Lima, appears to have been of the wantonest.
There were complaints of overreaching, tyranny,
and dissolute conduct of the authorities. At the
EXPERIENCES OP GERMANY. 39
same time, the early colonists appear themselves to
have been no angels, and some were undoubtedly
jail birds, whose fetters were slipped at the moment
of exportation.
Brilliant results were, under the circumstances,
hardly to be expected, even had no civil war broken
out in 1835. Still the hardy nucleus persisted.
From 1831 to 1844 no new colonies came to the
province of Eio Grande. The nine years of revo-
lutionary conflict, from which the Germans at first
kept aloof, eventually split them into two parties,
one for the Government, one for the insurgents, and
from this time they seem to have persecuted and
destroyed each other with as sound internecine feel-
ings as any of the natives. In 1844 the German?
commenced coming again, and the nucleus began in
time to use an attractive force from its own bulk
and reputation worth all the artificial influence of
mendacious agencies. There were still troubles
enough to be borne, hard work to be done, and
hardships to be endured, but the painted figments
of an Eldorado of idleness had been cleared away,
and colonization looked at in its real light. Things
worked steadily on from bad to better. Among
other troubles the attacks and depredations of the
Indians, though not so serious as in La Plata dis-
tricts, cannot be altogether passed over, especially
since they are rather to be estimated by the anxious
vigilance they demand than from the actual evil
40 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
they can succeed in inflicting upon a brave and
alert people. Still from time to time victims fell
under the arrows of the hostile aborigines ; in one
attack, indeed, no less than eleven persons ; and as
late as 1864, I read of one Johann Klink, of the
neighbouring settlement of Nova Petropolis, who
was interrupted in his victuals by the sudden ping
of an arrow that pinned his garments to his flesh.
The colony, however, worked through ; the seed
clung to the rock face, drove sturdy fibres into its
chinks, and Brazil is justified in claiming what
credit she may from its present exceptionally
favourable aspect. Though producing little or
nothing of the staple riches of the tropics, Sao
Leopoldo more than retrieves this shortcoming in
advantages of climate ; while maize, mandioca,
tobacco, rice, flax, hemp, sugar, peas, beans, wheat,
and vines, give no niggard variety of culture. In
1843 the value of the agricultural produce sent out
from the colony was about $300,000*; a sum
which in 1861 had reached $3,000,000 f; and the
municipal revenue at this latter time was no less
than $24,000 to $27,000, or about 2700/. " Enemies
of Brazilian colonization," says Mr. Tschudi, "should
at any rate just ask in this colony how many of the
colonists would exchange their present lot with
their former one in Germany, or how many have
any desire at all to return to their old home."
* Over 30,000?. f Over 300,0002.
EXPERIENCES OF GERMANY. 41
This first glimpse is of the good side, to count
the costs minutely would be a long affair; they
were much such as were paid by other nations.
Here are, however, a few specimens both of the
more remarkable among successful settlements and
of the more lamentable frauds and failures.
In 1845 was created that miserable delusion,
that imperial starveling, the colony of Petropolis;
situated in a locality bearing the ominous name of
" Corrego seco," " the dry stream." Here on narrow
slopes of crumbling gneiss, always between a torrent
and a crag, was founded one of the most numerous
German settlements of the empire, and here German
assiduity and sobriety have managed, and still
manage, to subsist on meagre thankless plots of
ground. But even this poor result is only owing
to the artificial stimulus of the Emperor's summer
residence, to the money brought by wealthy excur-
sionists flying the heats of Rio. The same influ-
ences also suffice to keep up trade on the Aegishorn,
and the want of them settles the fate of such
localities as Nova Fribourgo and Theresopolis.
Poor as was the choice, unsound as proved the
direction of many Government colonies, the greatest
prejudice, both to the reputation of Brazil and to
the fate of individuals, resulted from private specu-
lators and unscrupulous agents. In 1846 came the
first utterance of the accumulated sense of wrong,
in a correspondence between Herr Kanitz and the
42 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
Visconde de Abrantes, Brazilian minister at Berlin.
In one of the notes exchanged on this occasion, the
latter (as quoted by Consul Haupt) expresses him-
self strongly against what he styles the " system of
seduction," and against companies, agencies, and
speculators generally, admitting by implication the
validity of the complaints then urged against them.
While endeavouring to exculpate his Government,
he stigmatizes emphatically and effectually one of
the commonest forms of Brazilian colonization pro-
jects one of which Englishmen have lately had sad
enough experience.
Not that all enterprise of this kind, conducted by
private individuals, was equally nefarious. Very
far from it : as we have some of the worst so we
have some of the happiest projects among those
originally due to private initiative. Among the
better kind of work done in this way, we may
mention that of the Uniao colonizadoria de Ham-
burgo, a -society formed, in 1849, with a view to
turn part of the flowing tide of emigration of that
period towards Brazil. Not every society could
rely on such princely resources or such high protec-
tion. The Prince de Joinville possessed by right
of his wife, a Brazilian princess, a large but waste
territory in the province of Santa Catharina. Of
this fruitful wilderness he agreed to cede the com-
pany in question twelve square leagues for purposes
of colonization, wisely assuming that he would, by
EXPERIENCES OF GERMANY. 43
this cession, vastly increase the value of the portion
retained by him. The moment selected for the
enterprise was propitious, and the labours of the
association were soon apparent in the foundation
(in 1851) of Dona Francesca, or Joinville.*
This colony seems from the first to have caught
something of the air of its high sponsors. It cer-
tainly consumed great sums of money, drawing
largely both on the Society and the Princes of the
House of Orleans, and the Brazilian Government,
to say nothing of considerable sums obtained from
the colonists themselves in purchase of their lands.
In return for all this, Joinville, if it did not show
very solid agricultural or financial results, offered
itself for contemplation as a model, an intellectual
paragon, an aesthetic nucleus, a fancy Zukunfts
colony. But the attention paid by the first director
to the amenities and graces of life, is thought to
have been to the prejudice of ruder, more material
interests, and there has been much disappointment
amongst sober men as to the results obtained from
this most lavishly assisted nucleus. While lands
were sold at fancy prices, the colonists found it
hard to live on great expectations and brilliant
representations, and so, at one time, a great number
left, the colony. Still, the climate, notwithstanding
some endemic fever at one time, is fair, with cool
* The Due D'Aumale, as well as the Prince de Joinville, was con-
cerned in the matter, I believe.
44 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
nights and occasional frosts, the soil is in parts
good, and there are now good roads. Altogether,
therefore, though somewhat cramped in its develop-
ment 'by the avowed intention of the Grand
Seigneur not to sell his lands, but only to grant
perpetual leases, Dona Francesca, or Joinville, is no
failure, and, with an actual population of between
4000 or 5000 souls, looks forward to a future of
solid prosperity.
One of the most flourishing of German colonies,
Blumenau, in Santa Catharina, is in its origin even
more thoroughly a private enterprise, and was
entirely the offspring of individual energy. But a
man of such integrity and generous enthusiasm as
Herr Blumenau, the Brunswicker, is an unique
apparition in the chronicles of Brazilian coloniza-
tion. The necessary lands were obtained partly by
purchase, partly by state gift, in a healthy fertile
neighbourhood on the river Itajahy, which serves as
an admirable means of communication. A nucleus
of Germans had already been established in the
neighbourhood as early as 1827. It is known as
the "old German colony," and was formed of a
portion of the colonists brought out by Major
Scheffer, the man who had been so active in pro-
curing colonists for Sao Leopoldo. Herr Blumenau
proceeded very cautiously in settling colonists in
his domain, beginning with only seventeen persons.
Altogether he introduced as many as 834, and in
EXPERIENCES OF GERMANY. 45
1864 the census of the place gave 2471 inhabitants.
But it rarely if ever happens that a Brazilian colony
enjoys that exuberance of luck which might make
it a success for all the three factors usually con-
cerned in its fate, the country, the colonists, and
the founder. One or more has to pay the piper.
To the country and colonists Blumenau was de-
cidedly a success ; but this result was only obtained
by the enthusiasm and sacrifices of the founder, who
finally found himself out of pocket by no less a sum
than 16,000 Prussian thalers (2400Z.).
The country, however, which cannot but gain in
the end by these enterprises, black as things may
look in the interval, very properly relieved Herr
Blumenau from his personal losses, indemnifying
him in full. At the same time the Brazilian Govern-
ment took over the colony, though it wisely retained
as director the high-minded man who had originated
and so far fostered it.
The first volunteers obtained in the province for
the Paraguayan war marched from Blumenau.
In the same district, on the little Itajahy, a
stream far less to be relied on for navigation, there
was formed, in 1861, the Government colony of
Brusque. It seems to have been badly administered.
In 1861 it had 406; in 1864, 938; in 1866, 1212
inhabitants. Likewise in the province of Santa
Catharina, is the colony of Theresopolis, founded in
1860, having, in 1865, 1500 inhabitants, and 1530
46 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
a short time ago. Also Santa Isabel, founded in
1847, on good hilly land, with about 150 Germans ;
counting 284 inhabitants in 1861, and subsequently
851 ; and Sad Pedro, of Alcantara, founded as
long ago as 1829 on the River Mucuhy. Begin-
ning with 523 persons, mostly Germans, to which
number 93 more were shortly after added, this
latter colony had, in 1844, 2000 inhabitants. It
had a good deal to endure both from the animosity
of Indians and jealousy of whites inhabiting the
neighbourhood, the latter keeping a hold on the
land, though they did not work it, and was finally
emancipated and invested with municipal dignity.
It is doing well, but is no Paradise of idleness.
In 1851 Senator Theophilo Benedicto Ottoni, a
name sacred in Brazil, originated, with his brother
Honorio, the company of navigation of the Mucuhy,
with the object of benefiting their native province
Minas, by a new way of communication, and a
colony. The name of the projectors augured little
of the evils afterwards engendered, but the point of
view was essentially Brazilian, and the site of the
new settlement was selected some two or three
hundred miles from the coast. The surveys were
so imperfect, that, only after the works had gone on
three years, was the startling discovery made, that
the way by the natural high road, namely the river,
which it was intended to replace, extended over
only 25 leagues of navigation, instead of 40, as had
EXPERIENCES OF GERMANY. 47
been estimated ; whereas the new route, instead of
extending for only 16 leagues, would stretch over
40!!
The effect of this discovery on the Company may
be imagined. I pass on to the European point of
view and the colonists. These did not arrive as
freely as was expected ; the Germans were getting a
little shy ; an agent was accordingly dispatched to
Europe, and through his mediation some good
colonists, with not a little trash, were procured.
Relegated to the wilds, they soon experienced dis-
gust and disappointment, resulting, in 1856, in
lamentable scenes of violence. Meanwhile there
had been founded in Rio de Janeiro the famous
(latinice famosus) central association of coloniza-
tion, the chief agency of which in Europe was the
house of Beaumont, in Antwerp. These pages
are not the place for sifting dirt, nor is it really of
much interest to know whether the respectable
house at Antwerp, or the illustrious Brazilian
association, are most responsible for the monstrous
impositions which were practised between them.
All that now avails is so to mark the coin that it
may have no chance of passing a second time
without detection. To give an example, then. In
a proclamation issued on the part of the association
in question, we find Brazil spoken of as " that ex-
travagantly fertile land." Now, over an immense
extent, especially of those southern provinces chosen
48 BRAZILIAN COLOXIZATIOX.
for the sites of colonies, it is gneiss tossed into hills,
furrowed by gorges, scooped into narrow valleys by
torrents. The decomposition of this rock, together
with the mysterious agencies of the South American
drift period, have in parts produced a rich aluminous
paste ; the rest is a lean granitic wilderness. For
this latter sun and water have indeed done wonders,
and have here and there piled up a fair thickness of
humus, but they took aeons to do it, and when it
is gone, even those magicians cannot quickly vivify
afresh the wastes of quartz. A little farther on the
same documents assert, that "carpenters, stone-
masons and joiners can earn at the least thirteen
francs a day, and cultivate their lands besides."
Opening the reports on the industrial classes pre-
sented to Parliament in 1870, at page 520, any-
one will be enabled to judge for himself of the naive
mendacity of these agencies, especially if he consider
which way wages have tended since 1857. On this
page, the current wages in Brazil are given thus :
Blacksmiths .. .. .. .. 2s. to 3s. per diem.
Carpenters 3s. 4s
The next sentence is better suited to burlesque
than to the scenes of tragedy to which it played
the prelude.
"To give an idea of the advantages awaiting
emigrants to that country, a detailed account of
which would be very long, it suffices to mention
this one fact: shooting and fishing, which every-
EXPERIENCES OF GERMANY. 49
where else are either strictly prohibited or exceed-
ingly expensive, are there free, and of great advan-
tage to the colonists ! "
Imperial generosity ! All this anybody may have
gratuitously ; that is, if he can catch it.
Everyone who has had experience of tropical
American virgin woods knows, that for practical
purposes, the game consists rather in beetles than
beasts of the chase, in ferns than feathers, and in
thorns and ticks than either. Now, Brazil is so far
from being an exception, as far as my small expe-
rience goes, that though I took out guns, ammuni-
tion, and a retriever, I soon turned plant hunter,
and never shot anything larger than a swallow the
whole time I was in the country. I once saw an
armadillo, occasionally the tracks of paca and tapir,
now and then heard the far-off discord of parrots
and monkeys above the vast dome of foliage, or
caught a rare glimpse of Penelope or Inhambu, but
this was all ; and yet I spent a great part of my
time in the forest. I took to orchids and my dog
to wasps. Some of the streams no doubt contain
abundant fish, but they do not answer to the
whistle, and few persons, except Brazilians, find
time to spend on enticing them. The gentle art
is wisely left to Indians and Creole whites, who
can live on next to nothing and would live on less
to save themselves from labour. Still there is more
truth in the asseveration of the placard than was
E
50 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION'.
meant, for the shooting and fishing of Brazil might
perhaps, by one who knew their value, be taken as
types of the advantages assured to colonists emi-
grating to that empire. Meanwhile the fishers of
men had baited well; a large number of unfortu-
nates were decoyed by this agency, and dispatched
to the jungle of the interior to form the colony of
Philadelphia. After deceptions, disappointment,
and misery had led to complaints and disturbances
of all kinds, the Government interfered, and sent an
agent to inquire into a state of things which had
already cost many lives. The somewhat unqualified
report of this functionary no doubt exists in the
ministerial archives to this day ; but would be diffi-
cult to obtain. It is said to have been exaggerated.
At any rate the Government found itself compelled
to take over the colony in 1861, and under this
high protection it still vegetates. It was in the
early years of the Mercury Company, 1852 et seq.,
that the Germans made their experience of the
Metayer (Parceria) establishments and of the Agency
Yergueiro. They differed little from those of the
Swiss already discussed, and require no further
comment. They must have considerably damaged
the market. The same remarks apply to the miser-
able imposture of Major Bias, on the Bio Novo, and
to Santa Leopoldina, both founded in the province
of Espirito Santo in 1856. Transylvania, of the
same year and province, was a failure; after which
EXPERIENCES OP GERMANY. 51
we come to some new colonies in the provinces
south of Rio, which are palling through.
In 1863 we find the G-erman envoy in Brazil
journeying to Sao Leopoldo to endeavour to obtain
a settlement of the long-standing complaints of the
colonists with respect to the measurement of their
land late justice, which he seems, by the co-opera-
tion of the Central Government, to have succeeded
in procuring ; and finally, in recent days, we hear
of the Federal Government of Germany warning its
people, through the columns of the ' Staats-An-
zeiger,' against contract colonization schemes lately
set on foot by the Provincial Governments of Sao
Paolo and Rio Grande do Sul.
To sum up the chequered results of German
colonization, of which it has only been possible to
give the narrowest of glimpses, in so far as they
concern Brazilians, Germans, and the moral for
Englishmen :
Firstly, as regards Brazil, Germanism, for good
' or ill, has in that land become a fact ; the egg, be
it cockatrice or chicken, is hatched, and the best
course must therefore be to cherish and attach the
young, of no matter what feather. Smother it, and
it will sting the best protected hand ; conciliate it,
and it will one day lay golden eggs.
The reason of the above remark will scarcely
seem apparent to those who ignore to what extent
Brazilians, until very recently, were opposed to all
E 2
52 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
foreign colonization, and that the old colonial virus
still elaborates a jealousy which even the stern
necessities of the day fail entirely to negative. The
practical power and vitality of this feeling may be
gathered from the fact that in 1864 the municipality
of the great German centre of Sao Leopoldo con-
sisted almost entirely of Brazilians, while in that of
Nova Fribourga there were, in 1861, out of fifty-
seven municipal functionaries, but two naturalized
foreigners, although the latter class formed the ma-
joVity of the population ; but these times are passing
away, the young is nearly fledged, and, as Mr.
Tschudi remarks of Rio Grande do Sul, " German-
ism has become a power against the uninterrupted
growth of which the jealousy of Brazilians fights in
vain."
In a financial point of view, owing to improvi-
dence, carelessness, dilettantism, bad management,
and the dishonesty of subordinates, the German
colonies have cost the treasury large sums ; but
there can be little doubt that, though the above
causes may retard the day, the industry of Teuton
men and the fecundity of the women will eventually
more than balance the account. Failures in all
other senses, such colonies as Mucury, Petropolis,
and Nova Fribourgo have been no failures for
Brazil in the fresh blood and sinew, thrift and
energy dispersed over the country from these
wretched centres, she at least can well afford to
EXPERIENCES OF GERMANY. 53
forget the hunger and heartsickness of the victims,
the dead that in their poor way likewise enrich her
soil. In the new element thus acquired, and its
power of attracting reinforcements, Brazil need do
nothing but congratulate herself; it is the finest in
the country and the same which boasted 1800 years
ago,
" Nullos mortalium armis aut fide ante Germanos esse."
Next, as to the Germans : what the Brazilians
paid for in money and loss of reputation, Germany
subscribed in flesh and blood, making a heavy bill
against the horde of paid puffers, agents, recrutatores,
speculators, and rascally directors. We have seen
to what scenes and recriminations the items of this
bill gave rise as they occurred. The bitter tone of
the German consul's writings on the subject, though,
may be, excessive, speaks for the impression pro-
duced on an intelligent man and an advocate of
European colonization, in a position giving him
unusual facilities for judging of the question. In
Germany there has been clamour enough at various
times on this head; but among it the sound of
serious voices, worthy of attention, arguing honestly
against emigration .to Brazil ; while the Govern-
ment itself has, on more than one occasion, spoken
distinctly and authoritatively in this sense, and
especially against the schemes of private persons.
Still those Germans who have held out have secured
54 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
themselves an independence and a livelihood, a free-
dom from police, paternal restrictions, and elaborate
taxation not easily attainable in their own land,
though their hands keep, after all, as horny, their
gait as heavy, and sometimes their stomachs as
hungry as in the home of their fathers.
Pastors, professors, engineers, merchants, and
representatives of most other branches of human
activity have been supplied, as well as agricultural
colonists there being no less than 500 Germans in
the town of Porto Allegre alone, and 2000 in the
city of Rio de Janeiro, so that Germany's stake in
the country is a manifold as well as a large one.
" Wer nicht nachgiebt der gewinnt." The fight has
been fought and won by sheer persistence. This is
an age which soon buries its dead. Whatever it
cost, Germany may, on the whole, be proud of her
inheritance in the well-to-do arid peaceful empire of
Brazil; while hard-working Germans, who have
their eyes open, their pockets not quite empty, a n
their minds clear of illusions, might easily go to a
worse place.
And, thirdly, as to the moral for Englishmen.
Does anyone suppose that if Germany owned one-
tenth of the flourishing colonial territory of Great
Britain, any appreciable number of her sons would
drift to heterogeneous and alien shores? Remote
aggrandizement and nautical enterprise have not
IK.TII in her way of late, though her day may
EXPERIENCES OF UNITED STATES. 55
come. The lurking, scarce-formulated wish to Ger-
manize on a more material basis than the hospitality
of other nations may some day be realized.
Meanwhile the peaceful conquest, with its grow-
ing centres, will serve as an ever more and more
congenial outlet for her crowded population, as
breathing-room for a great nationality beyond the
narrow European pale, as a mine for her merchants,
and perhaps, in time, as a ripe field for her mis-
sionaries. But an Englishman may find all this
and more on much better terms, without ever going
beyond the ruddy reflection of his own standard,
without being called on to exchange his Penates for
some uncouth gods, without submitting to the gyves
and pinionings of a repugnant legislation, or to
the constant fretting of abhorrent modes of life and
thought. Half the estimate of a purchase is the
price, and no man chooses willingly the dearest
mart. We have seen the price paid by Germany
for her footing in Brazil ; but though necessity may
warrant it in her case, this does not justify or
explain the demand of Englishmen to be included
in a similar bargain.
Of all the many vagaries of Brazilian colonization,
the immigration from the United States was perhaps
the most abnormal and peculiar. It was one baker
borrowing flour of another, the brewer selling malt.
Such transactions point at once to some transitory
disturbance of the usual conditions of existence ; and
56 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
in this case the great civil war and the abolition of
slavery were the elements of Brazil's opportunity.
She scarcely appears to have profited by it as she
ought to have done. Instead of New Orleans, it
was New York that, strange to say, was made the
port of exit from which free or assisted passages
were granted ; and an American Company, that of
the " United States and Brazil Mail Ships," obtained
a contract by which, for certain considerations, they
engaged to import emigrants at a moderate charge.
If, as is most probable, the choice of a northern port
as point of departure deterred many Southerners
from availing themselves of the Brazilian offers,
something alluring in the proffered terms contri-
buted not a little to make up the deficiency from
other sources. In this way a considerable number
of Americans reached Brazil, and were distributed
among the southern provinces. Among the new
comers were men with fair sums of money, exiles
from the old slave States. Hatred of the North
determined their departure, slavery proclivities their
selection of a new home. In December, 1866, the
Company's steamers landed 200 citizens of the
North American Republic, and later on, some
thousands more at different intervals. But this
stream of immigration has, I believe, at this time,
ceased altogether its unnatural course, in spite of
the hyperbolical propositions occasionally brought
forward by the restless speculation of the Yankee,
EXPERIENCES OP UNITED STATES. 57
ready to supply anything to anybody. Those that
came with it, and many of whom returned soon
after, gained abundant experience of the want of
system, preparation, and foresight which presides
over emigration matters in Brazil. There were the
same heartburnings and complaints, the same dis-
tressing scenes ; and, in particular, the unfortunate
creatures who were exposed without proper shelter
to the torrential rains and climatic influences of the
month of January in Cananea, are not likely to
attract others by their reports. This latter place, to
which numbers both of Americans and English were
at different times dispatched, was always changing
its population, fresh reinforcements arriving ever
and anon to fill the gaps left by those who aban-
doned it. In these times Rio was full of helpless
Saxons, not always of the meekest temperament.
The Government was assailed with reproaches, food
and lodgings had to be provided, and the hospitable
house of the editor of the 'Anglo-Brazilian Times,'
the indefatigable champion of Brazilian emigration,
harboured at most times tattered examples of the
perpetual abortion of the cause for which he at all
seasons so recklessly enters the lists. As with the
Americans, so it was at the same period with the
English, the Anglo-Saxon race seemed to show a
particular impatience of what they looked upon as
injustice, a desperate restlessness under the depress-
ing influences of their new-found Paradise. Private
58 BRAZILIAN" COLONIZATION.
purses were taxed for the nourishment of these
luckless families during their stay in Rio de Janeiro,
and sometimes for payment of their passages back
to their homes, while I remember to have seen an
excited crowd of my countrymen threaten Her
Majesty's bachelor charge d'affaires, that they would
come and lay their babies on his doorsteps, if he
failed to procure the satisfaction of their demands.
Poor bachelor ! poor babies !
At the same time North American emigration was
very far from universally popular in the Empire.
There was a not unnatural prejudice against the
keen, hard adventurers of the North, much such as
an oyster might have against admitting a nail as
bedfellow as though there were some danger of
the heterogeneous element remaining segregated as
gout-stones in the system : and indeed that nation of
filibusters, those grey-eyed fanatics of a destiny of
Empire, might well give rise to qualms and appre-
hensions, did they come to squat in numbers in a
soft and peaceful land. Meanwhile experiences have
been made on both sides, and though North Ameri-
can enterprise and energy is likely both to gain and
bestow much profit in Brazil, it will be as the
results of isolated, individual initiative, when shoal
emigration from the Republic is, as I believe to be
even now the case, at an end.
As after the civil war in the United States, so, too,
after the last struggles of the Poles,- projects were
EXPERIENCES OF DANES AND MONGOLIANS. 59
concocted at Rio in 1865-6 for landing something
from the troubled waters ; but remained, as far as I
know, without any appreciable results.
Danes to the number of nine appear on the list of
colonists of Estrella, in the province of Rio Grande ;
and, strangest item of all this motley category, Dona
Francesca contains a small number of Icelanders,
who, notwithstanding the change of climate, are said
to be doing remarkably well, and giving great satis-
faction by their industry. Certainly, if in the case
of British subjects also, Brazil limited her importa-
tions to any there may be roaming in the more im-
mediate neighbourhood of the Pole, no monitory
voice need have been raised.
Lean Mongolian figures lounging between two
round, suspended fish-baskets, like perambulating
pairs of scales, show that the universal pis aller, the
coolie, has not been forgotten. These men are the
survivors of the brutality and bad treatment heaped
upon an importation of that unfortunate race which
was made in 1856. An English house contracted
for the introduction of 2000, but after 566 had been
landed, the contract was for some reason rescinded.
Nay, in her perplexity, and in view of the compara-
tive barrenness of her union with so many foreign
stocks, Brazil has even had recourse to self-fertiliza-
tion, and indulged fond faith in Parthenogenesis.
She has, in fact, colonized herself in several spots,
Estrella, Sinimbu, Iguape, Ttajahy, for instance :
60 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
and yet not even this homologous imping has given
brilliant results.
This cursory, but not one-sided, glance at the
Protean forms of Brazilian colonization is now at an
end, leaving, I trust, the reader capable of answering
himself this question :
Whether there be anything in the experience of
other nations, or the fate of former colonies, which
could justify the Englishman's adoption of so incon-
genial a stepmother ?
But even the experience of others does not
warrant the rejection of that which in itself is mani-
festly good. Englishmen assert the right of trying
things on their own merits, for themselves, asking-
only in the more expensive trials, that there be some
solid and certain advantage indubitably present in
the background of worth sufficient to justify risk and
reward success. The worth must be, moreover,
higher or the risk smaller than in other ventures
lying more conveniently to hand. Let us see if it
be not possible to detect some such high intrinsic
qualities in Brazil. And, first, let it be premised
that broad characteristics and not exceptions must
form the basis of our estimate, which must, further-
more, be limited to those districts practically acces-
sible to colonists, and available for the establish-
ment of new communities.
First, then, as to the climate. As I was a native
of the tropics, and have subsequently visited various
ADVANTAGES OF BRAZIL CLIMATE. 61
parts, such as Central America, Darien, Peru, Mar-
quezas, Sandwich Islands, Brazil, &c., there is some
faint primd facie grounds for assuming that my
humble judgment of those enchanting lands will
neither be tainted with prejudice nor altogether
worthless from ignorance. With this premise, I
would respectfully submit that, whatever wholesome
influences the regions of Cancer and Capricorn may
be fitted to exert on the cold, acarbonic races of the
future, the fact of a place being situated within the
limits of the torrid zone is at present, cceteris
paribus, a presumption against its perfect suitability
as a habitation for northern men, or for the evolu-
tion of the highest energies and noblest qualities of
the human race. Only admitting altitude to pro-
duce in great measure the results of latitude, it will
not require very erudite researches on the surface of
the globe, or among the pages of history, to see that
all experience here points one way. Indeed, any
profane tourist may substantiate for himself this
awful blasphemy against the sun, by Baconian
" travelling instances," he need not travel' far to
find. In the second place, the tropics of Brazil in
particular suffer from conditions which, if they be
found also in some other countries, are nevertheless
far from inseparable from torrid regions in general.
The trade winds sweep straight from the ocean over
the eastern portions of that country. No drop of
water has. been taken from them, and, in this satu-
62 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION".
rated state, they rise to the higher levels of the
maritime mountain range, where they seem to be
rung by unseen hands, so sudden and tremendous is
the deluge which ensues. This water tears down
the valleys in destructive torrents, drenches the
marches, and rises again and again in mephitic
vapour, decocted of rank vegetation, and trying to
human health. But far more than this is it the
large amount of moisture which, at certain seasons
of the year, remains suspended in the air and does
not come down, that is so trying to European consti-
tutions. The atmosphere and all it envelopes seems
viscid with wet, there is a clammy weight in the
lightest clothes, the muscular tissue relaxes, the
sense grows dull and heavy, the energies are para-
lyzed, healthy evaporation is checked, while exhaled
moisture trickles from the back of the hand, the
memory fails, a fretful languor makes even the
involuntary continuance of purely vegetable exist-
ence irksome and distressing. In such times pro-
visions perish, leather and other materials become
spotted and mildewed, metal in use oxidizes, glue
softens, plaster falls, wood warps, and man with
difficulty persuades himself that he too is not yield-
ing to the general impulse to decay, breaking up in
a crop of toadstools. These influences do not
fortunately continue during the whole year : in some
rare districts they are perhaps altogether wanting,
and in others no doubt, during many months unknown.
CLIMATE. 63
Ou the other hand, there are localities where this is
the prevailing state of things, while even in the
Serras the dry and bracing season is limited to a few
months.
Another consideration with respect to the climate
of Brazil is the situation of its great towns. While
the Spaniards wisely placed their capitals and chief
cities on the hill land, high above malaria, and far
away from the swamps and noxious influences of
tropic coast lines, the Portuguese founded such
noble towns as Bahia, Rio, and Pernambuco on the
very beach, within the everlasting haze of the foam.
Between the strand on which these cities are erected
and the foot of the Serra do Mar stretches a band of
hot country, varying in breadth from 20 to 100
miles, containing some of the most fertile portions of
soil. But unfortunately, like the fabled Hesperides,
they have their dragon ; for it is precisely at the
foot of these tropical ranges, amidst the marshes
from which they rise, that some of the most terrible
fevers are met with. If the yellow Jack, with
its predilections for mariners, seems to hang along
the shore, the hideous effects of true malaria are
mostly met with at some distance from the coast,
near the spurs of the mountains. Conscious of the
importance of the vicinity of some great town to
agricultural colonists, and aware of the rich resources
of these lower lands, it has been proposed to settle
colonists in some of the more salubrious portions of
64 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
this torrid region, in such neighbourhoods as the
Fazenda of Santa Cruz and Campos. But the
climate of these localities is totally unfit for Euro-
pean labour, as the Savoyard victims at Belem and
the Swiss graves at Macucu might have taught the
Brazilians, had .they wished to learn. Between good
soil and bad climate, bad soil and fair climate, the
choice too often lies.
But there was a monster ravaging Rio de Janeiro,
when the unfortunate British colonists returned from
Cananea the other day, which has still less the
freedom of the tropics a python born of the union
of refuse with the soft sea wind, springing into fearful
activity just where her humid breath kisses his stag-
nant hiding-places. The yellow fever is altogether
unknown over a vast extent of tropical America.
The Pacific coast is, with some exceptions, exempt
from it ; and in Central America generally, unless
it be at the Atlantic part of Grey town, this loath-
some scourge is unheard of. It is perhaps no worse
than some of our European forms of the family
certainly not than typhus. Unlike the latter, it
leaves no results, while it is far more expeditious in
making up its mind a characteristic which may,
however, be variously appreciated. Nor is it by
any means so fatal as supposed, when promptly
treated; and one doctor I knew had, in 1871, a
merely nominal percentage of casualties.* Finally,
* I see in my journal, 1870, that of 300 cases admitted to the Sauda
Hospital in January of that year, 82 died.
CLIMATE. 65
it is not contagious. Still, when the atmosphere is
propitious and the cases multiply, it is a grim plague,
and a bad inference against the climate ; and the
more so that it seems to infuse its working into the
entire community.
" For over all there came a kind of fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And spoke as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted."
Whether it be panic, or more probably some real
action on the system, the spell acts on all men,
sound and sick, mostly intensifying, exaggerating
their dispositions and intoxicating their spirits. All
maladies and ailments then end in yellow Jack;
and it would seem, not so much as if now and then
an individual of the society had the fever, but rather
as if the fever had the whole community as the
spider has the fly it has drugged, the owl the mouse
its dreamy eyes have marked. Whether the dainties
are eventually devoured is another question; but
this year the vomito seems to be dispatching an
unpleasant proportion. Instead of 20 deaths a day
recorded in Rio in 1870, I see now from the papers
as many as 40 per diem, representing perhaps 100 or
150 fresh cases in the twenty-four hours. The seeds
of the disease appear to have been in the country
for twenty to twenty-two years. It was preceded
by a fever known as the polka fever, being, contem-
poraneous with the first introduction of that dance.
F
66 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
It certainly would seem at present to be endemic,
although there was a pause in its periodical return
before 1869. When not very rife, it usually selects
its victims from new comers, then Europeans gene-
rally, and only when the appetite has been sharp-
ened by eating, preys upon natives or coloured
humanity niggers being almost exempt. This fine
discrimination may account for the comparative
nonchalance with which the Flumineuses, as they
style themselves, continue to regard the periodical
visitations of a scourge the control of which lies,
after all, so much within their power. Those who
have seen carcases floating in the canal, a dead
mule lying weeks by the principal roadside; who
have watched the hideous scenes of blood and
vultures at Sao Christovao, or the tideless shallows
dancing for ever the self-same refuse on the shore ;
who remember water at Is. Qd. a tiny barrel, in the
capital, while ancient intrigue still disputed what
company, of the many offering, should be allowed
to confer this blessed necessity upon the town ; who
are haunted by these and such like reminiscences of
the half-drained city in the marsh, can think it no
wonder if the vomito cling to and nestle in the spot.
Now the German consul, to-morrow the English,
have three crewless vessels on their hands ; now a
few score emigrants have passed from their ship to
the fine hospital, and from the hospital to a better
place ; such things are injurious to commerce, and
CLIMATE. 67
bad enough ; but though they call forth the pleasant
ticklings of benevolence, they do not raise wheals
like fear. I remember talking of the yellow fever
to a cultivated and distinguished native as we
steamed one day across the sunny bay. " Getting
bad ? " said I. " Oh no," said he. " Twenty cases
a-day, though!" "All foreigners," said he. This
was instructive enough on the subject of " points of
view." But I went on :
"Beg your pardon, but there are now cases of
Brazilians," mentioning such and such a one.
"From the interior and from other provinces"
(no Flumineuses), calmly rejoined the large-minded
patriot.
Here we are landed with the cod-fish and the
calves again. It is all point of view ; and some
such consideration may explain the fact that even
Sao Fidelis, on the Parahyba, where the soil is
fertile, but the climate stifling beyond anything in
the province, has lately been suggested as a good
centre for colonization.
Since the day when Galvani's dead frog lay
quivering on the table, we have made considerable
progress in observing the wide and varied range of
action of a mode of force whose workings formerly
counted among the instances of the supernatural, or
passed altogether unheeded. Though the arcana of
this mysterious power are still unpenetrated, no one
now ignores its constant effective action on the
F 2
68 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION'.
human frame; its close connection with nervous
energy, muscular power, and all states of health
and disease. Such being the close connection be-
tween electricity and life, the electrical conditions
of a country must be one of the most important ele-
ments in estimating its climate. Subject, no doubt,
to constant change and fluctuation, both from the
seasons and from causes of slower and of wider
action, there is, nevertheless, often sufficient perma-
nence in these conditions in various places to enable
them to be considered as part of the basis of any
judgment pronounced on climate. These condi-
tions in Eio de Janeiro are those that precede a
storm. In fact, the country has been, electrically
speaking, waiting for a thunderstorm for some years
past. Formerly these storms, of which there is so
much need, came daily with such regularity that
men made appointments by them, as they would by
the movements of the sun. Some years ago this
regularity ceased, and the storms became rare, a
state of things which reached tension-point before
the outbreak of the fever, in 1869-70. It was clear
enough to many people that the health of the pro-
vince and the storms were intimately related ; as to
the vigour of the individual, horse-flies are the only
creatures to whom the final outburst of thunder and
lightning brings no resurrection. From the electrical
peculiarities of the climate, then, the European will
have much to suffer in many parts of Brazil.
CLIMATE. 69
I do not pretend to know anything about ozone
whether it be a form of oxygen in which the atoms
are peculiarly grouped, or what ; but I believe, like
my betters, in its important hygienic value. Well,
the first thing I heard of ozone in Brazil was from
the captain of the mail steamer, who informed rne
simply, that on the southern coast, near Rio, it did
not exist. Ozone papers, moreover, have, as I have
been informed, never detected but the smallest quan-
tity of that invigorating combination in the air.
But unless this should smack too much of meteor-
ological alchemy, I will finish up with one fact,
showing that there are spots in Brazil which, for
tropical localities, are peculiarly unfortunate. By
far the chief mortality of Rio de Janeiro is from
consumption.
Meanwhile, let it not be understood that I would
include half a continent in one predicate, or class
the Brazilian climate with the lethal ones of earth.
It has its good sides and its bad, and territories
under the prevailing influences of either ; but it is
not such but what it behoves Brazilians, especially
colonization agents, to retain their modesty of ex-
pression; and unless from a vegetable or insect
point of view, it must not be compared with that
of Europe, nor, what is here more immediately to
the purpose, with that of more favoured tropical
districts.
An agriculturist runs the risk of suffering in one
70 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION'.
of three ways from this climate ; either from terrible
droughts of long continuance; from frost on his
plantations, if he lives in the highlands, or from
permanently diminished energies for work, if he
inhabit the warm lowlands. There are undoubt-
edly districts in which these inconveniences are
reduced to a minimum, or wanting altogether ; but
that will be a lucky colony for which such a site is
selected, with good soil and neighbouring port or
market into the bargain !
How such a damp climate as has been described
can suffer from drought may appear strange ; it is,
however, easily intelligible. Such a vast empire as
Brazil is a little universe ; what applies to the coast
land is no longer true of the high plateaux of the
interior, where the breezes arrive drained of their
moisture; while the climate of the northern and
southern provinces can rarely be included in one
bracket.
The burning sun and high temperature of the
tropical districts makes, moreover, an exception-
ably long cessation of rain, even in the usualld
humid regions, more fatally pernicious than it would
be in cooler lands, though it may not affect the
question of the general moisture of the climate.
One or two frosts a year are sufficient, as we know,
to exclude certain productions altogether from many
countries, no matter how favourable to their de-
velopment the remaining time may be. Serious
ADVANTAGES OF BRAZIL SOIL. 71
droughts, however rare, are equally pernicious to
many forms of culture, and are the bane of such
provinces as Rio Grande do Norte, Piauhy, Per-
nambuco, Sergipe Goyaz, Ceara and Matto-G-rozo,
being more frequent in some than others, and
mostly confined to the interior regions of those
which border on the sea. Even Rio de Janeiro has
cried aloud for water; and in 1869 the people of
Sad Paolo were starving on that account, and pro-
visions had to be dispatched to them from Rio.
As to fertile land there is undoubtedly a good
deal in Brazil, mostly, when not appropriated, grown
over with dense forest ; but there are also vast dis-
tricts of fern (Pteris aquilina, Mertensia dichotoma)
and of coarse rough grass infallible indications of
barrenness and poverty of soil, wide tracts of sand
supporting only the columnar cactus and contorted
bushes, broad wastes of quartz rock defying even
these pioneers of vegetation.
Perhaps the commonest soil, and that which
colonists mostly come in contact with, is that de-
rived from the gneiss or granite rock, with its conical
hills of all sizes, and its accompanying pasty clays
and drifts. It forms the greatest part of the pro-
vince of Rio de Janeiro and a vast portion of Brazil,
an analogous red drift having been found by Agassiz
on the shores of the Amazons and by Darwin on
the Plate. Such a formation is likely to produce
a soil of, on the whole, far from startling fertility.
72 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
According to the varying proportions of the con-
stituents of that most uncertain rock, and its me-
chanical condition, whether as solid stone, soft
yielding masses, or as triturated paste, it will in-
clude all limits between the desert and the garden.
The latter quality, under the name of " barro ver-
melho," is highly esteemed, has been much sought
after, and in many places converted into the most
flourishing native estates of the Empire. The former
kinds constitute a large part of the starved highlands
on which the colonies of Petropolis, Juiz da Fora,
and Theresopolis were founded.
There is plenty of land in Brazil, on which any-
body may settle for the smallest consideration, just
as there are scores of rivers in which anyone is free
to wash for diamonds. G-ood land, however, in
convenient neighbourhoods and streams which roll
octohedral crystals, are not in quest since yesterday
alone, nor open to the first comer. The best soils
in all localities have long ago been " viewed," and
where it was possible to bring them into tolerable
communication with a market, appropriated, if not
cultivated. Round the large capitals and towns
are often immense areas of land which the owners
do not cultivate, but which are not on that account
to be had at a moderate figure, for their drone-like
proprietors, often enough, will not part with them.
We have already referred, in the instance of S u
Isabel, to the cramping effects of this dog-in-the-
SOIL AND AGRICULTURAL SYSTEM. 73
manger disposition. Let a Brazilian, the Director
of the Emigration Society, Senhor Tavares Bastos,
now speak a word on the subject :
" One of the greatest obstacles to spontaneous
emigration consists in the fact of a vast extent of
the best land, and that which is situated in the
vicinity of markets and roads, being in the possession
of large landowners. This fatal consequence of the
unintelligent system of grants, followed without
discrimination by the metropolitan Government, is,
in addition to the above evil, likewise a bar to the
development of free labour in the country."
Such are the fetters to her natural development
which still hang on Brazil as heirlooms of the colo-
nial days. Mr. Hermann Haupt speaks thus on the
same subject :
" The Portuguese system bequeathed to the Em-
pire a deplorable state of things with regard to the
land. All that gave promise in more or less distant
days of wealth, had been disposed of to private
persons whether by gift or sale. The nation thus
found itself bereft of Crown lands in those situations
of the various provinces in which they were most
needed. The coast provinces no longer possess any,
arid only in the interior, and in distant provinces of
lesser importance, are fertile and extensive State
lands still to be found."
It is startling to find tenants on the edge of
virgin woods holding by the feudal payment of
74 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
ground-rent, but rich is the " foro " which Brazilian
Marquesses of Carabas receive in exchange for their
perpetual leases. The gifts of principalities, the
wasteful system of agriculture on a large scale, the
employment of slave labour, the prejudice against
foreigners, and the impossibility of providing them
with lands, are all of a piece, and hang together.
For long no more such gifts of one or two hundred
square miles have been made ; but Brazilians who
have the best information, through their scouts,
continued and continue to pounce upon each rare
discovery of a really fertile nook, and buy up dis-
tricts equalling a parish or a county, without any
corresponding obligation to cultivate them. Thus
we have such vast latifundists as the Baron das tres
Barras and the Clemente Pintos, and it were well
indeed for Brazil if all her territorial magnates were
cast of the same metal as these latter. But the
descendants of the old grantees are not all so en-
lightened, nor is any qualification necessary for the
possession of a kingdom in Brazil. When the lands
were brought into cultivation, it was on a system
which in its wild destruction resembled the forest
fires with which it commenced ; ever consuming and
advancing with only a desert in its rear. Virgin
woods were burnt down ; the virgin soil planted,
exhausted, and abandoned ; when, locust-like, the
Fazendeiro, and his band of blacks, passed on to
fresh destruction, reckless of the future climate and
SOIL AND AGRICULTURAL SYSTEM. 75
agricultural prospects of the country thus laid waste.
" Apres moi le deluge," was the ruling maxim in
this heedless hurry to grow rich. And the deluge
came, indeed, very literally over large areas where
the fire had passed before, the deluge of the tropic
rains sweeping bald the unprotected hill tops, and
washing their last rests of humus to the river beds.
It is a singular fact, noticed to me by more than
one person of experience in Brazil, that the climate
of the serra has been affected by the destruction of
forests in a way exactly the reverse of what we
expect in Europe, the rains having increased, the
cold diminished. This is also the reverse of what
could be wished in Brazil, and accompanied further-
more by a great augmentation of the denuding and
devastating power of the rains.
Thus, then, not only have a great proportion of
the available lands been taken, but taken and de-
stro} 7 ed , while we cannot suppose that it is to the
exhausted tracks of thin capoeira (second growth)
that the Empire's panegyrists make appeal.
Slaves do not live for ever, nor would the slave-
trade last for ever ; hay had to be made while the
sun shone ; and surely it was shining with an
African to be got for Wl. ! " lots more where he
came from," and the coast still free. The work, the
workman, and the scale of operations were all
matched; what small proprietor, or free settler,
could compete with such an agricultural stampede ?
76 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
but the line of yet unpillaged soil recedes yet ever
farther from the coast, the slaves are now dying,
the traffic stopped, the institution mined, and the
days of such latifundists and locust farmers at an
end. The nation will soon, indeed, have leisure
and motives for turning its attention once more
to the desert on which this desolation has passed ;
but it will be generations before the land recovers
a fair proportion of its pristine virtue.
It has been proposed to grapple with this state of
things by expropriation laws, replacing the State in
possession of some of the large areas which reckless
colonial policy formerly bestowed on private per-
sons; and also, in like manner, to confer on the
central authority, in consideration for a proper in-
demnity, the control and ownership of extensive
public lands still held by many of the provinces.
Another caustic remedy proposed is a land-tax,
which would compel the owners to cultivate or quit.
It is easy to conceive the serried opposition likely
to be arrayed against such surgical reforms, until
such times, at least, as the disease shall have
reached its acutest phase. Against the latter mea-
sure the Brazilian Fazendeiro who is now well
into a bog which none but the sturdiest can hope to
wade through may reasonably urge a good deal.
All his instruments of production are continually
rising in price ; his distance from the market has
increased ; competition in his principal staple, coffee,
SOIL AND AGRICULTURAL SYSTEM. 77
is likely to augment ; and he has already to bear
the burden not only of a considerable provincial
and imperial tax on his produce, but of what is
equivalent to a tax on his drove of mules, for the
imperial dues are levied ad valorem on the market
price in the port. Under the present circumstances,
very many of the class are more or less deeply
indebted, and not even the late depreciation of the
currency enabled them to clear themselves. Put an
additional burden in the shape of a land-tax upon
them, and will they ever get out of the bog, some
of the most quaggy portions of which lie still before
them ? If such a tax were introduced at all, it
should be as a tax on non-cultivation, applied in
inverse ratio to the production, the uncleared wil-
derness, after so many years' possession, paying the
most; the thriving fazenda a mere nominal sum.
But we are not now concerned with remedies for
this diseased state of things, having here only the
more invidious task of registering the presence of
the malady, as one largely affecting the question of
colonization.
The romantic reputation of Brazil has profited
by her propinquity to Europe, from which it is
directly reached by sea, It has thus been for
many Europeans who have visited that country, the
first and often also the last glimpse of tropic mag-
nificence. Now, though I would be the last to
disparage the grandeur, colour, and luxuriance of
78 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
that beautiful land, I must confess that older travel-
lers, accustomed to note things closely, and coming
from other regions of the American tropics which I
am acquainted with, to Rio de Janeiro, would cer-
tainly be struck with the vegetation ; but it would
be rather with the absence of a certain wild luxuri-
ance, with the want of giant forms. Here the fact
that he was contemplating the second growth of an
exhausted soil ; there, the bleak situation on the
sierra might explain, but would not alter, the case ;
at times he would plunge into a rich gorge, and
console himself with admiring some huge iron-tree,
or the spreading crowns of half a dozen Jequetiva ;
there, again, he might come across the lofty Re do
Matto, king of the woods, or the swollen carcase of
a Bombax. But in all this he would see little but
what torrid sun and water could work out of a thin
soil, and the memoiy of the Ceibas, Taxodiums, &c.,
of his former travels would come back like recol-
lections of another race. In a word, such provinces
as Rio de Janeiro certainly produce a very great
variety of beautiful woods, but the growth of the
trees, though striking to an European, is not, as a
rule, luxuriant for the tropics, nor is the size
attained remarkable. Though it occasionally hap-
pened, it was rare that I came, in my constant
raids through virgin wood, across a tree of greater
girth than three times my extended arms, at 4 or
5 feet from the ground, a fine size in a Swiss pine.
SOIL AND PRODUCTIONS. 79
Most larger trees are show-trees. It has been said
in- the usual hyperbolical style of the so-called
friends of Brazil, that you need but scratch the
surface of the earth and a crop will come up.
Scratching the red crumbling gneiss is not, how-
ever, on the whole, to be recommended. The next
rain may lay bare a stonier layer. I found during
some little experience, which may, however, I be-
lieve, be fairly taken as typical at least of the usual
upland slopes, that to get grass for a horse or cow
a goodly plastering with manure is absolutely ne-
cessary, and that in all but the coolest or most fertile
neighbourhoods, each plant of grass had to be planted
by hand. The grass thus treated, the Capim d' An-
gola, is fortunately more luxuriant when started
than that of European hay-fields ; but it must be
weeded, hoed, and manured continually, or it would
soon disappear under scrub and fern.*
Tried again by comparison with other countries,
we do not find that the productions of Brazil make
up in quality any shortcoming in quantity. The
coffee of Brazil, though better than its reputation,
ranks, with certain unimportant exceptions, very
* Of the usual tropic plagues Brazil has her share, like other lands.
It is not necessary to catalogue them here, the more so as they are well
known. But as the prophets of colonization are hardly as modest as
they might be, I annex this note of the fellest. Droughts, floods, fires,
birds, anta, such as the fearful Sauba (Atta Cephalotes), caterpillars,
monkeys, and, lastly, what affects agriculture by incapacitating the
husbandman, numerous poisonous snakes. Of the latter I saw more in
Brazil than I have come across elsewhere in the tropics.
80 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
low in the market. It fetches a lower price, and
may consequently be presumed inferior to that of
Ceylon, Mocha, Java, the West Indies, Central
America, and most other countries ; and yet coffee
is the plant of all others to thrive in light soil and
hill lands.
Another tropical staple whose virtue will depend
on certain subtle principles to be elaborated from
the soil is the material of chocolate, the fruit of
Theobroma cacao. This tree is extensively culti-
vated in the northern provinces; but here, again,
while the cacao of Soconusco, in Guatemala, was
reserved for the tables of kings, and very superior
kinds are produced in Caraccas, and other old
Spanish colonies, that of Brazil is of inferior quality,
whence, no doubt, the different reputation in Europe
of Spanish and Portuguese chocolate.
Again, Bahia produces very fair tobacco ; but
the general quality of the crop raised in Brazil is
below that of many tropical lands, both in delicacy
and potency of flavour and in freedom from attacks
of insects while in store.
The real secret of Brazil as a field of enterprise is
the stability of the Government and the peaceful,
inoffensive character of the Portuguese race, not
the peculiar virtues of her soil nor the exceptional
alchemy of her sunlight.
Were climate and fertility all that had to be con-
sidered, there are portions of Central America
SOIL AKD PRODUCTIONS. 81
known to me which must, I believe, be pronounced
to be greatly superior. The trees are larger, the
soil more fertile, and the coffee, cacao, and tobacco
superior; while the list of other productions in-
cludes almost every staple of the tropics, indigo,
sarsaparilla, cochineal, vanilla, balsams, india-
rubber, not to mention mineral wealth, which may
yet be found to rival that of Minas. Beautiful
timber abounds in both countries; but beautiful
timber is not always useful, being hard and heavy,
and often growing sporadically. Thus Brazil is
compelled to import large quantities of deal from
rimy Norway, while the hills of Central America,
on the other hand, are dark with forests of gigantic
pines. But through pines and palms alike of that un-
fortunate land comes ever and anon on the soft wind
the harsh sound of " muera " this one, or " muera "
that one, and so the beautiful siren still remains
eclipsed by her far more homely but more honest rival.
Giving, then, this great Lusitanian empire its just
due, while divesting it of the paint, padding, and
perfume with which narrow-minded and mostly in-
terested panegyrists have disguised it, we come to
the question, Is there anything transcendent in the
soil or climate which, even cceteris paribus, should be
held sufficient to allure Englishmen from their homes,
or divert them, when bent on wandering, from British
colonies both within and without the tropics ?
If not, in what shall we hope to find the solid
G
82 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION".
advantages with which to justify the rash experi-
ment ? It is not in affinity of race ; no Brazilian
will attempt to class the Saxon or the Celt with the
Portuguese, the negro, or the Puri. It is not in
the mutual comprehension and reciprocal suitability
of opposite or complementary characters ; although
Brazilians may, as a rule, understand Englishmen
and their institutions somewhat better than Senador
Junqueira, who, during my stay in Rio, rose in hia
place in Cortes and said, " The English have in
their legislation absurdities not in that of Brazil;
for example, the provision which authorizes a hus-
band to take his wife to a market, and sell her
there." Englishmen in their turn often enter into
the workings of the Brazilian mind no better than a
batch of British colonists I saw in Eio, entered into
the reiterated offers of the Brazilian Government to
remove them to any colony which they liked of a
number proposed, or to secure them work elsewhere,
coupled, however, with the refusal to pay certain
accounts which the Englishmen presented for work
done in the colony they had come from. It was
alleged, with some reason, that the books of the
colony having been destroyed, the Government had
no means of checking these accounts. But it was a
point of view John Bull could not see at all. He
had " cut down their woods for them, and was
willing to do it again, but paid he must be before
he budged anywhere else."
LAWS, CUSTOMS, AND RELIGION. 83
It were already a bad enough business to plant
artichokes with lilies, or cage the laramergier with
macaws ; but with man, race, besides the vegetable
life and animal, means the hidden framework on
which delicate tissues of custom, character, and
morals are extended, including everything from
food to faith. On the former we will not dwell,
though the bread and beef eating Englishman would
content himself quite otherwise than the German, on
bananas, beans, and came secca. But from the
latter, with the intellectual bent and moral sense,
hangs the important mesh work of the law and all
its stays of custom.
Brazil is not bigoted, but the Roman Catholic
faith is the religion of the land, and as such ultra-
montanism, tradition, and superstitious indifferent-
ism will sustain it for some time to come. The
Protestant emigrant, meanwhile, will enjoy fall free-
dom of conscience, little affected by the fact that his
chapel bell cannot be rung, and that the functions
of senator and deputy are inhibited to him. As
long as the colony remains compacted in its clearing,
a little imperium in imperio, he will feel no isola-
tion. He may even separate from the nucleus and
travel the country, like a stone in a horse's foot,
without being distressed by any approach to
religious zeal in those he meets. It is only when
induced to strive after closer assimilation than such
a stone, when he would drive roots and suck nou-
c 2
84 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
rishment, when he would influence at least the
provincial and municipal councils of his adopted
land, only then will the " heretico " feel his aliena-
tion and the limits of religious tolerance.
Or the revelation may come upon him in the
sacred relations of the family, in a land where the
want of civil marriage reduces Protestant wedded
life to a legalized concubinage. We will hope he
has arrived married, so that he may be secure from
making the experience in his person. Being an
Englishman, however, his daughters will be quite
white, and being quite white, they will, in the eyes
of young Brazilians, be beauties. A mixed mar-
riage takes place. The consent of the bishop, to
begin with, costs $32 about 31. 5s. and, as well
as the celebration of the marriage, is conditional on
an oath being taken by the parties that all the
children will be brought up as Catholics. If such
demands are to be made by the Catholics in Eng-
land, as certain late occurrences might alarm one
into supposing, English Protestant fathers will know
what to do ; but an emigrant to a Catholic country
may have but the only alternative of condemning
his children to perpetual celibacy, his family to ex-
tinction. Besides, the marriage, or worse, may, and
probably will, take place anyhow, though he shut
up his Danae in a tower of bronze.
To such mixed unions as secure the progeny to
the Church, the bishops will naturally make no
LAWS, CUSTOMS, AND RELIGION. 85
objections. But there are other cases arisen out of
this incongruous state of things which are among
the grossest scandals of the kind in Christendom.
The colonist may arrive as a bachelor, and marry in
the country. Supposing he is duly married to another
Protestant by the clergyman of the colony, his mar-
riage will, according to the late law, of September
1861, and the subsequent regulations of April, 1863,
be duly recognized as valid for all civil purposes.
But one of the parties may subsequently be won over
to the Catholic faith, and then comes the possibility
of the other being made the victim of an unjust and
immoral decision, such as startled all Rio, in 18. ..
To give somebody his due, I do not think a second
edition of that insult to humanity is likely to be
tried in Brazil ; and the late judgment of the Bishop
of Sao Paolo, in a somewhat similar case, shows that
the enlightened spirit of the Church condemns it.
Still, it was not till 1861-63 that the Protestant
got tolerable security for his marriage at all, by the
establishment of the competency of the civil tribunals
to decide on them ; and by the due legalization of
marriages by Protestant pastors, which guaranteed
him from moral obliquity in high places. Now for
the case.
A Protestant Swiss woman, wife of a Protes-
tant, duly married at the altar, went over to
the Roman Catholic religion. The worthiness of
the motives of this change has been emphatically
86 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
denied ; and certainly the immediate results of the
conversion gave fair grounds for the denial. The
priesthood of the convert's new Church was soon
called upon to sanction and bless her union with a
Catholic. The question being referred to the autho-
rities of the bishopric of Rio de Janeiro, they found
it conformable to their instincts of purity and the
spirit of their Church to decide in favour of the
adulterous tie, on the ground, it appears, that a
disparity of faith "cultus disparitas" reduced the
previous bond fide marriage with a Protestant to
concubinage. This decision created almost universal
indignation at the time ; but I am not aware that
it was ever rescinded.
A subsequent judgment, rendered, in 1862, by the
more enlightened bishopric of Sao Paolo, redeemed
the honour at the price of the consistency of the
Church.
Two Swiss Protestants had been duly married,*
had lived together as man and wife, and had two
children. According to the law of 1861, above
cited, this marriage would seem to have been per-
fectly valid and in due form. But it is provided
by the law that no marriage shall be held valid to
which there are such impediments as would invali-
date a Catholic marriage. It appears, furthermore,
that, according to the canonical law received in the
* Whether only civilly, or civilly with some religious ceremony, is
not quite clear.
LAWS, CUSTOMS, AND RELIGION. 87
empire, disparity of religious belief " cultus dispa-
ritas " is such an impediment.* Now, it happened
that Wilhelm Blathoer took it into his head that he
preferred a Brazilian woman to his countrywoman
and wedded spouse. Wilhelm Blathner accordingly,
as a first step, had himself admitted into the bosom
of the Catholic Church. He next applied for an
injunction to be furnished from the (rovernador do
Bispado of the province, for the celebration of his
nuptials with his Catholic bride. To this application
he eventually received an answer which must have
made him wince pronouncing him still bound by
the tie contracted as a " heretic," forbidding him
altogether fresh nuptials, urging him to work out
the conversion of his Swiss wife, impressing on him
the education of his children in the true religion,
and finishing with a moral couched in the brevity of
eloquence " pague as custas," let him pay the costs.
This document is signed Joachim Manoel Gonzalves
de Andrade to whom be all honour.
The last part of this decision calls upon the couple
to " educate their children in the one true religion,
as they had already promised to do while in the state
of heretics" Does this mean that such a promise
had been extracte from two Protestants at the
* Mixed marriages are, no doubt, considered by the Church as evil
in themselves ; but to be allowed for special purposes, one such purpose
being proselytism. Hence the facility at present granted for their cele-
bration.
88 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
time of drawing up the marriage act ? Even the
benefit of civil marriage, coupled with such an
obligation, would be a farce.
Of a verity one would have thought that a fierce
sun, African and Indian blood, a celibate caste, and
inhuman solitudes, were sufficient impulse to concu-
binage and free love, without a state of law such as
the above cases betray.
Marriage suggests, or at least produces children,
and children will sooner or later make the colonist's
family acquainted with other laws of the empire, for
which, in his stolidity, he will probably be little
prepared. These are the laws of succession and
inheritance. If he has married a wife without
making a contract, and a contract he is not likely
to have made, and if this wife dies before him, he
will be startled by learning that with the dissolu-
tion of the partnership in this manner, he loses his
rights over one-half of his own hard-earned pro-
perty, which becomes vested in the children. Nay,
in default of the latter, he may be even more
grievously disconcerted by an intimation on the
part of his wife's relations, advancing on their own
account a claim to a like amount a demand in
which the law will give them an unqualified sup-
port. He is not likely to marry many successive
times under these circumstances, but it is easy to
picture his ultimate position and that of his heirs
by his last wife if so be he did !
LAWS, CUSTOMS, AND RELIGION. 89
If the shock of this discovery be too much for
him, and he follow his wife to the grave, his children
will have an opportunity of making acquaintance
with another branch of Brazilian law, and, what
will touch them closer, with the administration
thereof. I allude to the provisions respecting the
guardianship of orphans.
I have heard much of the integrity of the court
invested with this charge in Eio de Janeiro, artd
have even heard Englishmen aver that they would
rather have its tutorship than that of their own
consuls. I doubt if anything of importance can be
advanced against its written precepts. But there
are places in the empire in reaching which a letter
grows yellow, where it seems indeed for those who
wait for justice, that " the heaven is high and the
Emperor far," and where all depends on the cha-
racter and integrity of subordinate functionaries.
That the incorruptible probity of these latter is not
always sufficiently rigid to guarantee the fate and
fortune of alien infants is too well known to serious
Brazilians. But if anyone will read the horrible fate
of two girls, the orphan children of a German colo-
nist, related by Tschudi,* it will give him a crying
instance of what enormities may happen without the
authorities having even a chance of prevention.
Not only the fate of orphans, but all matters of
succession to the property of a dead colonist, are of
* " Journey through Brazil," visit to the Province of Espirito Santo.
90 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
course, by right, in the hands of the local autho-
rities, subject alike to Brazilian law and Brazilian
loitering. In Petropolis, the tact of the late Ger-
man consul had created a happy exception; by an
affable, intelligent understanding with the native
officials, based on a knowledge of character, he kept
the practical management of most cases of succes-
sion among his countrymen in his own hands. The
authorities were of course called upon to validate
all formalities, but the wills were written in Ger-
man, and consequently Greek to Brazilian eyes.
The fact is mainly important as showing the weight
attached, both by the consul and his clients, to the
intervention of some non-native element in order
to secure prompt and certain liquidation of testa-
mentary business. It has taken the Brazilian
authorities, in one case, as much as eight years to
wind up the affairs of a dead Englishman.
It has been often and justly remarked that a very
imperfect code promptly administered with impar-
tiality and uniformity, is better than very superior
legislation applied by vacillating and dilatory hands.
It is not alone in cases of inheritance that the
foreigner will meet with opportunities of verifying
the truth of this statement in Brazil. Delays,
amounting at times to a denial of justice, are
only too common both in criminal and civil causes.
Brazilians are well acquainted through the columns-
of their own publications with the case of George
LAWS, CUSTOMS, AND RELIGION. 91
Adolphus Stolze, a German, established in the pro-
vince of Bahia, whose cause was espoused by the
Sociedade International de Immigrayao, and who is
spoken of in reports of that society as " atrociously
persecuted, ill-treated, and injured by the autho-
rities of the backwoods (Sertoes) of Bahia, notwith-
standing that his cause was, and was acknowledged
by other authorities to be, most just." But the
efforts of the society appear to have been as vain as
those of Stolze himself on his- arrival in Rio. For
years he remained without reparation, and, for all I
know to the contrary, remains still in the same
predicament.
A lawyer of the capital told me once that he had
been more than a year endeavouring to recover the
small sum of 31. for a client. A case came under
my notice of an immigrant kept nearly three
months in prison on a charge of threatening, and
then dismissed for want of evidence ; of an English-
man charged with assault, and only brought to trial
after ten months *, of another committed on suspicion
of robbery, and not brought to trial after nine
months. A whole crew was committed for murder
of their captain in March, 1869, first tried in De-
cember, 1869, and acquitted ; tried again on judge's
appeal, May, 1870, and all condemned to various
punishments with the exception of the man who
had actually struck the blow, who was acquitted.
Finally they were tried on their own appeal, June,
92 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
1870, and once more all acquitted. These men were
consequently nine months in obtaining a trial, a year
and three months in obtaining a final verdict ! !
Some cases require to be indicated to show that
the above views are no results of idle prejudice ;
but as it is very far from my intention to lay a
formal indictment against a nation, there is no need
to be more communicative and explicit. Those
who require further corroboration will find it in the
speeches of Brazilian senators and deputies, in the
archives of consuls, and in the honest avowals of all
Brazilians, who, as true lovers of their country,
would not,
" Like to the owner of a foul disease,
To keep it from disclosing, let it feed
Upon the pith of life."
The administration of justice, like many other
institutions of the country, is tainted with the virus
of petty personal politics, and perverted by good
fellowship. Blood is stronger than water x L P
Xeipa vurrei, and to refuse to serve my cousin or
my neighbour, by merely shutting an eye on occa-
sions, at no expense to myself, would be unkind.
Finally, mutual complacency becomes the rule, and
the first would-be exception must simply be content
with burnt fingers. It is in part owing to such
local interdependence, and to that false sympathy for
the criminal rather than the victim, common to
periods of under and over civilization, that culprits,
especially those guilty of blood-violence, so often
POLITICS. 93
escape. The amount of murder and assassination
in the country, though considerable, has, however,
I believe, been greatly exaggerated, and, consider-
ing the vast extent and other circumstances of the
country, is remarkably small. It is, moreover,
almost entirely confined to cases of personal ven-
geance ; thus leaving the prudent foreigner in
perfect safety. The Portuguese race are pre-emi-
nently long-suffering and peaceful, and the wildest
districts, out of reach of Indians, may be traversed
with no more deadly weapon than a tooth-pick.
Partizan madness, dignified by the name of
politics, is in all respects the bane of the empire,
entering into almost every question of life, hamper-
ing the real interests of the country, metamorpho-
sizing subordinate local officials into powerful agents
of electioneering tyranny, falsifying appreciations of
material questions, and wasting the energies while
perverting the sense of provincial and municipal
institutions. Thus the question of a road, of a
school, a church, divides the municipality into rabid
reds and whites; militia service becomes, in the
hands of skilful officers, a powerful engine of political
intimidation, enlistment answers the same purpose,
and acts of arbitrary tyranny are committed, now
on this side, now on that, for the benefit of unscru-
pulous string-pullers who have devoted themselves
to the profession of representative. Up the country
I heard strange complaints from Fazendeiros of the
way in which their interests were often sacrificed
94 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
from contemptible party motives. I once had the
honour of being the guest of an old man who had
made one or two beautiful estates out of the matto,
with plantations, parks, and mills, such as are no-
where to be surpassed. Lounging through the languid
air of the hottest season over the rich green slopes
of his domain, which hung above the rushing river,
and discussing everything, from the grass at our
feet to the future of the empire, we came, in our
discursive talk, upon the sore subject of the national
representation. Speaking to the son of the house
while my companion sauntered on, chatting to the
energetic, practical creator of the ordered fertility
about us I asked him whether it were not possible
to organize some sound representation of the agricul-
tural, that is, of the vital interests of the country,
some Fazendeiro party of the right sort ?
. "Ah," said my companion, a cultivated man' of
European experience, " my father was once induced
to offer himself as deputy, and to go in that capacity
to Rio; but he came back determined never to
waste his time by a repetition of the experiment,
and with the conviction that the Cortes was a nest
of parrots." Other landed proprietors of my ac-
quaintance, who belong to the most enlightened,
wealthy, and energetic under the Southern Cross,
pay as much attention to politics as they do to the
distant sound of tumbling surf which catches their
ears on their periodical visits to the capital.
POLITICS. 95
When Brazil first shook off the leading-strings
of Portugal, when separatist sentiments still were
strong, and old interests and prejudices, working
in remote districts, threatened the disintegration
of the empire and the desertion of individual pro-
vinces, there were men of no illiberal mind who
saw the necessity of strengthening the hands of the
central power. They therefore sanctioned, or even
strove after, a political system which they now con-
sider to have done its work, and to require modifica-
tion in many particulars. As it is, the President
of the province, the delegados and other agents
of the police, even the provincial and municipal
authorities elected under the influence of the former,
nay, the recruiting Serjeants and the officers of the
national guard, are so many wheels in a vast
centralized machinery, shrieking forth the jargon
of elections, and busy with the nothingness of party
strife. Thus the President of the province, pos-
sessed of autocratic power, and with unlimited
influence for weal or woe ; the man on whose
appreciation, together with that of the assemblies,
each new project of improvement, whether road or
rail, navigation, emigration, or what not, depends
this officer, with functions so essentially remote
from imperial politics, holds his appointment at the
good pleasure of the Crown, that is, of each succes-
sive Government ! With a right to dismiss all but
superior magistrates, and with an army of police
yo BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION'.
functionaries, known as delegacies and sub-delegados,
at command, he were a bad general, indeed, that
could not ensure the campaign.
Still, every victory thus gained is a reverse to
the true progress of the country. The very expres-
sion of that political opinion on which so much
stress is laid, is falsified or constrained by open
violence, the energies of the land are exhausted by
a vampire, and the councils of her citizens blinded
by miasma.
All this concerns the future of the country, and
consequently the colonist a good deal. He may
conceive how much that is written in letters of gold
on the law-books of the nation, becomes under such
a system worthless as falling leaves in the regions
of its application. He may thus understand how it
is that so much of crime remains unpunished, how
much the innocent may suffer before formal acquittal,
and how elastic are the meshes of the law. Take,
for instance, the noble provision for gratuitous na-
tional education in 33 of Art. 179 of the nation's
charter of what avail is it, where the holdings lie
scattered leagues apart, and the local authorities
ever snarl and bicker over liberal and conservative
views of the way the wished-for road should run ?
Or consider the following account (taken by the
4 Anglo-Brazilian Times' from the 'Liberal' of
Alagoas, of September, 1870) of the proceedings
of some police and gendarmes of that province sent
POLITICS. D7
out to arrest some comrades of the latter, who had
missed a parade, and compare it with paragraph 7
of Art. 179 as to inviolability of domicile. " Be-
ginning their work at midnight, they searched
25 houses from top to bottom, tied up and took
away 17 men and youths of all ages, thrashed 9 or
10 men and boys, ill-treated sundry mothers and
wives, damaged crops wantonly, stole a number
of things, including a demijohn of rum from an old
woman .... broke open a trunk, took the
lace from a pillow, and threw the blessed rosary
of a woman into the fire " : or read the speech of
Senator Pompeo in the assembly of the nation in
the same year, when he called attention to tho
increasing number of crimes encouraged by the
impunity, and sometimes even protection, accorded
by local authorities. I am afraid his words made
small impression on the Government, x eL P X i P a
vLinei constituents compel.
When, in addition to these reflections, we recollect
the institution of capangas or bravos, and the custom
of sheltering even monster criminals from pursuit, we
have the same school-boy picture of want of public
morality and respect for the law, the same absence
of a sense of personal individual responsibility to the
tribunal of conscience, which keeps so many Southern
and Catholic nations in swaddling-clothes. Sods
want a deal of turning before the old bog flowers
cease to come up. The contraband laws of the gold
H
98 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
and diamond monopolies, the colonial system, the
Indian raids, and the illegal slave-trade, will bear
their quagmire fruit for long after the land is drained.
There is an institution in Brazil pre-eminently
calculated to render the citizen autocratical, arbi-
trary, and unscrupulous, tyrannical and purblind
which, by facile pandering to vice, mines and cor-
rodes the pith and marrow of the family, and per-
verts the principles on which it rests, an institu-
tion stultifying religion, clogging the step of states-
manship, and, like a foul wind, baffling the flight of
humanizing thought. This institution founded,
nurtured, and safeguarded by the State, sanctioned
and utilized by the Church is interesting to the
emigrant, independently of all its other influences,
from representing the incarnate degradation of
labour.
Manual toil is branded and dishonoured in Brazil
the treason to humanity has had a retractive
curse, and the hand that once smote the nigger,
when called upon to save the country, falls blighted
to the side. The Brazilian neither can nor will
work ; hence the still greater urgency than other-
wise for obtaining a supply of those who will do so
for him. To play the statesman, the deputy, the
merchant, the speculator, the innkeeper, the huck-
ster, the overseer, the skipper, the " camarade," the
coachman, the boatman, the woodranger, or the
angler, he is willing and often capable enough ; but
EFFECTS OF SLAVERY. 99
to anoint his palni and handle a spade, to hew,
delve, or do any hard handiwork whatsoever, is
against his stomach, whether physical or moral, and
irksome to his spine.
In a growing community, where a horny palm
and a handy fist should be the noblest distinction ;
the heavy foot from treading, the big thumb from
twisting, and the thick lip from wetting the flax,
the best dowry in a wife ; men grow up as effete
and helpless as in ancient Sybaris or Croton. To
carry a pill-box or a peascod through the streets of
Eio is to proclaim yourself a pariah ; to walk with
a carpet-bag or paper parcel, excommunication. I
well remember the gauntlet of eyes fixed upon me
in blank amazement each time I landed from the
' Petropolis ' steamer, and walked bag in hand
through the rank of greasy chapmen to the nearest
tramway. Sometimes there was a touch of pity,
but always the most profound astonishment at the
menial tastes of one who seemed certainly quite as
white and nearly as well-bred as themselves. I
recollect a lad of fifteen or so, who used sometimes
to sleep out at a house I occasionally visited, his
family living some three or four miles away. As
happens with improvident youth of all nations, his
luggage often consisted of a hairbrush and a collar,
with, may be, a toothbrush to boot. Such a parcel
slips easily into a pocket; but the poor boy was
the Creole of a slave land, born under the ban, so he
H 2
100 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
must needs go home unburdened, and send a slave
trotting the long distance to bring back his things.
This occurred over and over again, and yet we are
told labour is scarce in such a country !
The choice on the large estates of the province of
Rio de Janeiro, which could formerly count on an
importation of from 20,000 to 30,000 blacks per
annum, has not hitherto been between slave and
free labour, but between the nigger and nothing.
For not only has the number of hands introduced
as immigrants remained as a rule at half that of the
annual slave supply of former years, but the ma-
terial thus obtained is so unsuited to the purposes
of the great Fazendeiros, that, without a complete
subversion of the present system, it could hardly be
made to pay. As an auxiliary for agriculture on
the old scale its value is little higher ; since it is
almost as impracticable to supplement slave labour
with free as oil with water. The Parceria colonies,
though a failure, were in so far right, as they were
rather a complete substitution of the one kind of
labour for the other white for black than an
attempt to work them in the same yoke. But
(though a long lease on good terms and under
favourable circumstances might sometimes content
the colonist) it is, as a rule, his own fig-tree that the
emigrant desires to sit under, not the banana of
another, no matter how full of fruit. The union of
labour with possession, by the institution of small
EFFECTS OF SLAVERY. 101
properties worked by the owners, would seem the
best chance left of rehabilitating labour. Anyhow,
whether the change come about by sale, rents,
enfiteusis,* or what, there are many signs indicating
that the days of the vast sugar and coffee planta-
tions on the old scale are numbered. In some
cases, where the soil is much exhausted, their place
will probably be taken by cattle runs and parks,
requiring few hands, and suiting the Brazilian
iudole ; in others, they must, it would seem, in
time be broken up into smaller holdings, having
their necessary machinery in common in some
central locality, just as is the case in the olive dis-
tricts of parts of Italy, the cheese-farming in
Switzerland, and the cane-growing of certain por-
tions of Brazil. Meanwhile we may understand
how, as things now are, several score emigrants may
be found occasionally in Rio with anything but the
aspect of the right thing in the right place ; one-half
of the community will have nothing to do with them,
while with the other they will have nothing to do.
One of the first requisites, then, for a wholesome
immigration on a right footing, is that the honour
of labour should be re-established ; and this can only
fully happen after slavery has been for some time
totally abolished. But meanwhile the peculiar insti-
tution directly affects labour by the diminution of
its proper remuneration. This is practically the case
* Permanent leases, paying a fixed quit-rent.
102 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
with regard to the spontaneous emigration of those
classes, such as mechanics, artizans, and skilled
labourers, which first finding a footing in large
towns, would otherwise eventually spread over the
country, or found families of children who did. But
the hire of these classes, independently of the low
purchasing power of money, and the other incon-
veniences existing in Brazil, is not high enough to
induce the exportation of men who, at the present
day in Europe, hold the ball of fortune in their hands.
The reason of this must, I think, be in great measure
sought in the one and a-half to one and three-quarter
millions of slaves in the empire, or more especially
in that portion of this huge total which is held in
ports and cities. In Rio de Janeiro, in 1870, every
fifth man was a slave.
Men not only use this species of cattle themselves,
but they let it out to others, and consequently a con.
siderable portion of the 50,092 slaves of the capital
are always to be had at rates of wages kept at a
comparatively low figure by the competition of the
owners. The African, if confined to one kind of
work, not only often makes an excellent subordinate
artizan, but may even be trusted, when the sphere
of action is capable of definite demarcation, with the
duties of master-workman. Thus it is that the black
is hired out right and left, here to a gas company,
there to a manufacturer, here as porter, there as
pedlar, now to mend my lady's dresses, now to
EFFECTS OF SLAVERY. 103
mend the road. Few handicrafts have not their
nigger adepts, who may be found from the smithy
to the pastrycook's.
When human beings come into the markets,
whether of Europe or America, besides the simple
rules of supply and demand, there comes the question
of the minimum for which they can live, and for
which they will work. Now, when our hungry
European, keen from the sea-air, attempts to make
his terms, he will find he has to reckon with a com-
petitor that can live on quite other food than he, and
that his will to work for it is effectively galvanized
by a cat and palmatorio in the background. Well
if he be not startled on the morning of his landing
by some such advertisements as the following :
" To be sold beyond the limits of the municipality
of the Court, a little mulatto 15 years old, who has
commenced the trade of carpenter, and is also a good
house servant. Further particulars, Rua Direita,
No. 8, at the end of the 2nd storey."
" To be sold a negress, eleven years of age, very
pretty and perfect, also a black lad who can cook,
&c., &c. Na Rua do Principe dos Cajueiros, No. 20."
Or, again :
" For sale, a mare and three months' foal, Minas
race ; the property of an Englishman returning
home, who is particularly anxious to find a good
home for them."
No ! What am I thinking of, I took the wrong
104 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
paragraph. This is the right one. "To let" . . .
No ! It had better remain in original :
" Alugase uma ama de leite, ino9a sadia e com leite
de inez na Rua do Nuncio, No. 20A, &c."*
Some such influences as the above are necessary
to account for daily wages of only from 3s. to 5s.
for engineers ; 2s. to 85. for blacksmiths ; 3s. to 4s.
for carpenters; 2s. Qd. to 4s. for roadmakers and
navvies; or from 4s. to 7s. to mechanics in the
"Uniao e Industrial" workshops at Juiz da Fora;
while I found an Italian Swiss carpenter up the
country, a good workman, and apparently in his
line a sort of mainstay of the estate, working for
about 3s. Id. a day and his food.f A blacksmith in
England earns at present from 5s. ; a navvy, 4s. ;
an engineer, 6s. 9d. ; a carpenter, 6s. 9d. ; a superior
mechanic, 7s. In Germany, in many cases, wages
are now very high, having risen 40 to 50 per cent,
in most trades since 1865. Thus we have, in Wur-
temberg, wages of adults ranging from Is. Qd. to
2s. lie?, in most factories, though going as high as
4s. 2d. in some ; and in some trades much higher
rates as printers, 4s. Id. ; carpenters, 2s. 6d in the
country, 3s. Qd. in Stuttgart ; smiths, 2s. 3d. in the
country, 2s. lid. in Stuttgart; masons, 3s. 8c?.; and
* Three ol these advertisements, including the Portuguese one, are
cut fiuni the daily papers.
f See Secretary's Report for 1870. For information respecting navvies,
&c., I am muebted to the kindness of Mr. Morritt.
EFFECTS OF SLAVERY. 105
quarrymen as much at times as 8s. 4c?. ! In Prussia
we find (Mr. Petre's Report) many classes of
labourers receiving from 2s. to 3s. a day, in 1870;
in Paris, in 1869, a blacksmith gaining from 4s. to
6s. 4fc?.; a brickmaker, from 2s. 9^J. to 4s. 9ic/.; a
carpenter, 4s. 9 \d. ; joiners and masons, over 4s. ;
quarrymen, from 2s. 9<i. to 4s. 9c?. In Austria, we
have smiths earning 4s. to 6s. a day ; joiners, 5s. to
10s. a day; men employed in the building trades,
about 2s. 8d; and so on. Figures eloquent enough
in themselves, but far more so when considered with
relation to the value of money, and to the comfort
and enjoyment for which they are exchangeable in
Europe. In Wurtemberg, for instance, a single man
can feed and lodge himself for from IQd. to Is. a day.
In Prussia, we find the various estimates of the
annual charge of feeding a family of five persons
varying in the several provinces between III. and
111. a year. In Vienna, the working man's own
estimate of living for a single man is put at 53. 4s.,
including clothes and lodging; but it will be ob-
served that the wages of that city are likewise very
high.* The price of lodging for working-classes in
Europe varies amazingly from year to year, and
from place to place; generally speaking, however,
the accommodation obtained will be both better and
cheaper than in the cities of Brazil. Wages are not
only at this high figure, but the upward tendency
* Sec Reports ou condition of working classes presented to Parliament.
106 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
seems not yet to have exhausted itself; while the
worth of the earnings is greatly enhanced by all
kinds of associations, clubs, benefit and co-operative
societies, which the emigrant must leave behind him.
But whatever be the cause, it is clear that the
rate of wages in Brazil for skilled or heavy work is
if anything below the best market price in the effete
old world ; while it is not to be presumed that the
European would be wise in leaving country, asso-
ciations, friends, language, customs and laws behind,
to undertake an irksome journey, accustom himself
to a depressing climate, risk a bout with yellow Jack
or " febre perniciosa," overcome prejudices against
him as an alien, perhaps as a heretic in order, sad-
dled with the cost of his journey, to begin a new life
at the antipodes, even if, instead of something below
or equal to his present earnings, he were quite certain
of obtaining a good deal more than he had left behind.
No snake would scratch off his old skin in the
thorns, unless it were quite sure of the sleek splen-
dour underneath. But besides the slavery of blacks,
there exists a law in Brazil which creates something
very like a slavery of whites. This is the law de
locacao dos servos de estrangeros (a law respecting
contracts for services of foreigners). Destined to
place the foreigners entirely at the mercy of the
natives, and calculated in many cases to reduce him
to the position of a serf, this monster enactment is
the product of the legislative genius and enlightened
LABOUR LAW. 107
statesmanship of a nation that believes its future
to be so linked with the successful introduction of
foreigners, that it has not revolted from the most
questionable devices in order to obtain them ! It is,
nevertheless, a characteristic issue of the lucubra-
tions of a council of slave-holders. This law of
October, 1839, establishes a monstrous inequality
first, between Brazilians and foreigners ; secondly,
between employer and employed, and is totally at
variance with the general legislation of the empire,
which (with certain usual exceptions) does not admit
of imprisonment for debt. By its provisions, some
of the results of which have already been seen in
connection with the system of Parceria, any immi-
grant who has contracted to serve a native, say in
repayment of the expenses of his passage out, or for
advances made on his first helpless arrival, and who
fails in his part of the contract, is liable, if he escape
without "just grounds," to be seized in any part of
the empire, and to be condemned to payment of the
double amount of his debts to his employer, or in
default to serve him for nothing for " the period
wanting to fulfil the contract." Finally, he may be
imprisoned, with or without hard labour, until he
has paid the uttermost farthing, including the costs
of the process, the extreme time of imprisonment
being apparently limited to two years.* And the
* This is not very clear, as the qualifying clause occurs in a subse-
quent paragraph in which the case supposed is not identical.
108 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
application and interpretation of this law would be
the affair of provincial magistrates such as those
described in the following passage from a Report of
Councillor Valdetaro, dated 1858:
"The justice of the peace and the referee ap-
pointed in the contracts do not offer the colonists a
sufficient guarantee of impartiality and justice, espe-
cially in the case of those of different language, who
have no connections in the country save with persons
in a similar position to their own."
When we remember that some of the contracts
made the head of the family responsible, not only
for his own debts and those of his wife and children,
but also for those of other so-called members of his
family, and that the heir, contrary to all sane prin-
ciples of law, the Roman included, was compelled to
accept such a prejudicial inheritance, we have some
idea of the bitter bondage thus created.*
Finding, then, race, religion, speech, customs, and
laws alike unsuited to the English agricultural colo-
nist, in what are we to seek a justification of his
expatriation ?
In the hospitable and admirable arrangements
for the reception of emigrants; in the ease with
w r hich they find employment, through the assistance
* There were cases in the Metayer or Parceria colonies where debts
of 1853 were not paid off in 1866, and those who ran away were im-
prisoned. Mr. Hermann Haupt says that in the majority of cases,
when colonists under this system had succeeded in clearing themselves,
it was in part owing to property left them in Europe.
IMMIGRATION ARRAXGEMEXTS. 100
of regular agencies giving honest information; in
the facilities for the purchase of land, and for selec-
tion by means of maps of the required allotments ;
in the cheapness of that article ; in security of title ;
in the favourable position of agriculture with regard
to taxation ; in the existence of good means of trans-
port by land and sea ; perhaps in the special open-
ings for small industry here and there ; in all this,
is there nothing that will serve our purpose ?
Alas, I am afraid not. The reception of the
emigrant, in spite of humane, enthusiastic impulses,
is uncertain, his footing precarious. A refuge for
immigrants was established under the auspices of
the International Society of Immigration some
years ago, but they were compelled, for want of
funds, to make it over to the Government in
October, 1866. During the time I was in Brazil
20 months between 1869-71, there existed a
similar establishment under the auspices of the
Government ; but I have known the food supplied
there to be paid for by private benevolence of
foreigners; and, on another occasion, in which
many of my countrymen were concerned, the place
had to be cleared by force, owing to a characteristic
difference of opinion between the colonists and the
Government as to who was responsible for their
existence.
Such an institution as the Castle Gardens of New
York does not exist, and this is the more to be
110 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION .
regretted, that a night of exposure to torrential
rains in the Campo de Santa Anna, as once hap-
pened to a body of British emigrants, or a delay of
a few days on the sweet waters of the bay in the
hot season, means, to a good many, fever and death.
So many bad oranges in the case ! Of the arrange-
ments farther up the country, the progress of the
Swiss to Nova Fribourgo, the preparations of Major
Diaz at Eio Novo, and of latter years, Cananea, will
give eloquent instances. I am convinced that all
this will soon be, if it is not already, on a better
footing, just as young niggers are better treated
than ever of late ; but our estimate cannot be
formed on credit. The mere fact of so many emi-
grant vessels being brought to Rio at all, and that
at times even in the hot season, shows with what
carelessness the health of emigrants is exposed.
The same holds good of offices of labour such as
so greatly facilitate the position of new-comers in
the United States. They are either wanting, or
have it not in their power to give the required
information. With the exception of certain dis-
tricts, Brazil is still, in spite of recommendations
in laws of a quarter of a century ago, waiting for
accurate maps and measurements of the disposable
public lands; colonists have been kept waiting
whole decades for their titles, and it has actually
happened that the Government has sold lands which
have afterwards been claimed by private persons.
PRICE OF LAND. Ill
Easy selection and acquisition, with sure title, are
vital conditions of colonization, and Brazil would
do well to study the arrangements to this effect in
the northern half of the continent, where a new
settler can, without leaving the port, pick out the
exact locality and soil he prefers, with a certainty
that he has not been overreached or deluded.
Nor, when all things are considered, can land in
Brazil be called cheap. Formerly granted on
leases, it is, since the laws of 1850 and 1854, only
disposed of by sale. The lowest price is f real a
bra$a quadrada (6 feet square), or about 41 3 J
reis an acre (say 10^.) ; the highest, $1, 653 reis,
as against from Wd. to 30s. in Canada, II. in
Australia, 55. in the United States. In the latter
country, however, the laws of 1854 respecting
gradual lowering of the price of unsold lands, re-
duces it, after thirty years without a purchaser, to
12J cents, about \ real a bra9a; while the Home-
stead Act of 1862 still further facilitates the acqui-
sition of land, giving a certain acreage for a merely
nominal consideration when cultivated for five years.
Besides the price in Brazil, in the districts of colo-
nies, is four or five times as much as the above
maximum, reaching as high as 10 reals a braca
quadrada, though the cost of measuring in that
extravagant country has not been estimated higher
than from 45 to 90 reals an acre. Under these
circumstances, it is not astonishing to find that the
112 BRAZILIAN fOLOXIZATIOX.
average annual sale between 1859 and 1862 did
not fetch more than from 2400J. to 2500, while
it appears that Victoria effects yearly sales and
leases to about 750,000. a year, Tasmania to
87,OOOZ., New South Wales to 545,000/., and the
United States to the value of 1,000,000.
While some of our colonies meet half their ex-
penses with the profits of the sale and lease of
public lands, Brazil also draws a large proportion
of her income directly from the soil i. e. no less
than from 600,000/. to 800,000. out of a revenue
of 9i millions from the coffee export duty alone.
But it is not from the sale of waste and unprofitable
territory, but from a direct burden upon agriculture,
that this sum is obtained, nor does it include the
"Pauta" or provincial dues, which in the province
of Eio de Janeiro amount to nearly half as much
again as those of the empire.* All this shows a
considerable strain upon the goose with the golden
eggs, that may eventually affect her laying.
With 4,891,394 square miles of territory, and
only two inhabitants to each, we must not expect
too much in the way of roads and lines of com-
munication. In some provinces a good deal has
been done and more projected ; but, considering
that this is a paramount object in the future of
Brazil, the energy is not equal to the occasion.
Several hundred miles of roads, equal to the finest
* That is the Pauta on coffee.
MEANS OF COMMUNICATION. 113
in^the world, are to be found; but while in some
cases there has been positive extravagance of im-
perial funds, the provincial high roads often remain
in the state of miserable "picadas,"* or worse, as
projects danced on the gusts of parish politics.
What, however, especially concerns the colonist is
the wretched state in which the colonial communi-
cation with ports and markets has in too many
cases been allowed to remain. While new colonies
are continually springing up, existing ones have been
allowed to languish for want of proper connection
with the outer world and the complaints are very
numerous on this score. It has been justly re-
marked that, had Brazil concentrated her efforts,
the results would have been far more satisfactory.
In 1856, no less a sum than 600,000/. was voted
for purposes of colonization, and it has been
estimated that of late years each emigrant
cost from 10/. to 20/. Surely it were better
to employ the greater part of these sums in
opening up the country, thus rendering salaried
puffing unnecessary, and leaving spontaneous emi-
gration to do its own work. There is scarcely a
question connected with the future of Brazil that
docs not halt and stick in the mud of the wretched
"picadas," or in the thorns of the impassable
" tacuadas."*
* Picadas are the tracks first hewn through the forest; tacuarlas,
matted jungle of the lar?e bamboo.
I
114 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
Santa Viaria should have the fairest shrine in all
the land, and every minister and public man bow
down before her, and cry, " Roads, roads, roads ! "
Without veins blood cannot flow ; and all galvanic
tricks are empty folly.
The six existing lines of railroad are nothing to
the requirements of the land. Though they are
being extended, and others, such as that of Campos,
Macahe, Sorocaba - Campinas, Jundiahy - Campinas,
are projected, Brazil at present has but some
500 miles of iron way, while Switzerland has
2136, the United States 48,860! and British India,
4000 !
With the coast communication, so important to
some of the colonies, it was, a short time ago, no
better, for though the road is in this case good
enough, not everyone has the necessary capital to
put a vehicle upon it. Sometimes steamers served
certain places for a short time, and then were dis-
continued, to the infinite discomfort of those
colonists who counted upon this mode of conveying
their goods to market. The coasting trade was,
until 1866, and may be again,* in the hands of
natives alone, and the freights, in consequence of
the monopoly, were often enormous. Mr. Tschudi
mentions that on board a Brazilian ship a bale of
* Free permission to foreign vessels to ply in the coasting trade was
extended to end of 1872. It has probably been again prolonged, but
still only on short terms, and therefore the possibility of its being again
withdrawn must be taken into our calculations.
MEANS OF COMMUNICATION. 115
cotton then cost more in going from Pernambuco to
Rio than if sent from the latter place to Liverpool,
and then back again on board a foreign vessel;
also, that on one occasion the Government had
to pay to a native ship five times the freight
demanded for the same voyage by a foreigner it
being illegal to employ the latter ! There are, more-
over, but a limited number of ports with custom-
houses to which ships are allowed to trade. The
navigation of the rivers is but feebly developed.
There are several companies connected with the
Amazons, one just started with emigration projects.
There is a steamer or two on the San Francisco ;
the Bahia Steam Navigation Company; a small
steamer on the Parahyba in communication with a
monthly one from Rio to Campos and there are a '
few plying at long intervals on some of the southern
rivers. Projects in abundance spring up ; now and
then a new company appears or an old one col-
lapses ; but altogether there is no consolation to
be sought in the steam navigation and river traffic,
to console one for the want of railroads and high-
ways.
The immense distances, bad roads, and want of
steam or other public lines of transport form pre-
cisely one of the conditions which render the com-
petition of the small farmer and lavrador so hopeless.
In order to send his produce to the coast, the planter
must possess a drove of mules in working order and
i 2
116 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
be able to replace cripples. From ten to several
hundred beasts will be required, according to the
size of the estate ; then there must be persons to
look after them and cultivate grass for them, pack-
saddles, and all the rest. But, as this is far more
than can be expected from many of the poorer
agriculturists, they have to make arrangements with
the nearest Fazendeiro possessing a drove of mules,
in order to induce him to take down their coffee for
them. This he is usually willing to do, and some-
times to buy it, of course on such terms as he con-
siders favourable to himself; but, in the former
case, he will naturally take down the whole of his
own coffee first, and, by thus forestalling, obtain the
best prices. In the distant competition in the port,
it is clear that this is not the only point in which
the small cultivator will come in weighted among
the agents of rich planters. In almost every aspect
of the financial question, from buying his slaves to
bearing up against the sudden fluctuations of ex-
change,* though compelled to pay pauta and im-
perial taxes with the wealthiest, he will be at a
great disadvantage. In preparing his produce it is
the same. While the " cafe' lavado " of the great
Fazendeiro will have passed through seven or
eight processes, until the grain comes out polished
and tinted according to the last whimsical demands
of fashion, the siteo's modest terredo will furnish"
* These fluctuations ranged in 1868 from Is. 2d. to 1*. M.
POSITION OP SMALL PROPRIETORS. 117
only roughly- shelled and discoloured berries, tainted
with the harsh flavour of the mesocarp, and much
less highly prized. The same remarks apply to the
successful production of sugar for the market. We
have seen how the lavradores of some northern
provinces make use of the boilers and machinery of
the Fazendeiro. Where this is not the case a
settler without capital must always find it hard
work to compete with the great slave-owning estates
of the steaming lowlands. If small properties can
ever compete effectually with large, which may
sometimes very well be the case, it certainly is not
where vast deserts interpose between the producer
and the market, and slavery still further disturbs
the natural conditions of the contest.
But there is yet another field left open to the
small proprietor, the production of provisions
beans, maize, mandioca, potatoes, and vegetables,
with, perhaps, an occasional pat of butter. It is
the field of the Portuguese, who purchases a ro9a
and first breaks ground for himself, and furnishes
the principal means of existence in such starved
colonies as Petropolis. No doubt, all these things
can, with a little trouble, be produced in most parts
of Brazil ; and therefore it is certain enough that
no man of the smallest energy and knowledge of the
country need starve there after the first six months.
But this, unless there be a large port or market
within reasonable distance, is all ; while colonists
118 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION*.
look, or ought to look, for something more. In
the remote settlement, where no exchange can be
effected with his surplus, the colonist must, at best,
rest content with the plough-boy's ideal of a kingly
life, "eat yourself full and then sleep." And when
the food is farinaceous and the sleep lethargic, it
must be a bad berth in the old world that the Saxon
will not soon regret.
Where, then, are the exceptionable circumstances
that justify the venture ? If in nothing of all this,
we can search no more, but only mutter
" Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galdre ? "
Colonization in some form or other, ancient as the
first movements of humanity, has in all ages been
promoted by one of two considerations either the
welfare and advantage of the exile or of the land
that sent him forth. The interest of the place of
destination, of the spot selected, has, with the
colonist, never been a motive. When, however, as
sometimes happened, in Epidamnus and also in the
Roman days for instance, wants of an old settlement
have given the original impulse to a stream of
emigration, the reinforcements thus invited, or the
metropolis acting for them, took care to see that
the interests of the emigrants fully coincided with
those of the people requiring them. The community
making the demand was, very properly, made to
pay handsomely for what was so essential to its
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS . 119
progress and existence, and this even to the amount
of a third-part of the cultivated soil the usual
allotment to new settlers.
The world has seen many kinds of colonization,
migrations by sea and land, for State ends or
individual relief, as a result of hunger, of political
oppression, or of ambitious enterprise ; with a view
to confirm and utilize conquest, or in order to
advance and secure commerce. Now, the colonies
were founded on known but little frequented dis-
tricts among a sparse and semi-barbarous popula-
tion, or in altogether virgin territories newly found
and opened to the race; now they were planted
in the midst of a vanquished civilization, or as
armed piquets on the ancient march of commerce.
But under all forms, from Naxos to Famagosta,
from the days of Motya to those of Mexico,
we find a leader of reputation, an organization
on the home model, and such a connection with
the mother-country as always secured moral sus-
tenance, often vigorous material support. It is
only in quite recent times that we first hear of the
foundation of colonies in a heterogeneous medium,
the oikistes being wanting, the metropolis ignored,
and the organization matter of chance and specula-
tion. Such settlements, left to the mercies of the
inhabitants they come to reinforce, who, however
enlightened and humane, behold the hazy interests
of the new-comers only through the more monster
120 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
mirage of their own are veritable hen and duck-
ling colonies. Within her sphere the mother's
stout pinions would have afforded shelter and
defence ; beyond it, the pike may pick and choose
ad libitum.
To spontaneous individual emigration distributing
itself naturally over the land, by a skilful system of
irrigation, flowing in obedience to law, in no matter
how strong a stream, these remarks do not apply.
But neither the diffusive agency, nor, except in
certain German centres of the southern provinces,
the attractive force exists in Brazil while irregular
enterprises under artificial stimulus are neither
emigration nor colonization, but gross, and often
reckless, importations of a delicate and perishable
commodity. When, to continue the simile, Brazil
shall have so trenched and prepared her fields, com-
prehended and applied the laws applicable to her
case, cleansed and repaired the natural water-
courses, the springs of the hills will of themselves
descend and infuse fertility into the land by myriad
rills, and when that day arrives there will be no
longer need, either for pressure and inflated propa-
ganda on the one side, nor for solemn warning on
the other.
Distinguishing always, then, spontaneous indi-
vidual emigration from mass emigration under
pressure ; and emphasizing once more the ad-
vantages derived by the latter form, which is that
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 121
of true colonies, from metropolitan protection, with
congenial organization and leadership far be it
from me to say that there is no opening for the
Saxon under the Southern Cross, or to desire to
taboo a liberal, orderly, and enthusiastic empire.
Let intelligent, sober, industrious men, if possible,
with a small sum of money in their pockets, go
either to the healthy mining districts of Minas
among their countrymen, or to the cool southern
provinces, and if they are masters of some handi-
craft they have a fair chance of doing well ; and,
once started, may grow rich. But they will neither
find diamonds in their drink-water nor gold-dust on
their dirty boots, and will have to struggle against
an alien speech, occasional prejudice, the competition
of the cheap and nasty, bad, expensive lodging and
clothing, and dear meat ; while, if they be invested
with the qualities presumed, they would have done
as well elsewhere. Brazil, however, has, it must be
admitted, that in common with most Transatlantic
countries, that a keen, hard man of humble origin
may, with luck, easier make a fortune there than in
the old world; but it is a game which I would
rather recommend to men from north of the Humber
than to the ordinary southern Englishman. Quick-
sight in commerce, skill in mining and mechanics,
soundness in finance, have filled, and will continue
to fill, English pockets in Brazil. But men who
thread such paths belong beyond the limits of this
122 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
subject, and the question of labour importation.
Still, as the good point of view of Brazil for
Englishmen is in this direction, it is pleasant to
advert to it. There are, then, many classes of
workers, from bankers' clerks to Cornish miners,
who have found good openings and done good
business in the country, and a sojourn of ten or
twelve years there, with intervals of absence, is,
for a prudent, sober man, no more than an average
price to pay for a competency.
- The empire is orderly, secure, financially sound,
fairly governed. Property is rarely attacked, blood
never shed for pelf, no yearly revolutions occur,
Gaucho brutality, Indian raids, and the horrible
cry of " Muerte a los Estrangeros," is unknown.*
The people, though sensitive, apprehensive, and
jealous, are kindly, hospitable, inoffensive, and
genial. They are ambitious of progress, intelli-
gent, liberal, and though slow in executing, quick
enough in comprehending new ideas. If we except
manual labour, of which they have abhorrence, the
Portuguese blood leaves with them, at least for some
generations, an elastic spring of energy and a tough-
ness of persistence not common in the tropics. As
in most young States and young persons, there
is much self-consciousness, often puerile self-satisfac-
tion in the national sense ; the desire of good govern-
* The rare, isolated, and feeble attacks of Indians, already mentioned,
bear no comparison to the raids of the Plate districts.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 123
ment, and especially of good reputation, being
stronger than the habits of earnestness and abne-
gation necessary for their attainment. As in too
many Catholic countries, public feeling in spiritual
matters is, with certain numerically feeble excep-
tions, divided between apathetic indifference, sensual
materialism, and gross superstition. While the new-
comer must not expect to be treated as a native,
nor to find in a young community either the reve-
rent precedents or the good living he has left behind,
he will encounter, with some wayward injustice not
specially directed against him, many instances of a
loyal desire to welcome him generously and treat
him equitably, even though he be on the whole con-
templated from an utilitarian point of view. But
after the competency acquired, let him come home
and marry in his own country.
I hope Brazil will give up enticing Englishmen.
It can do her no good, and can do them harm.
Persons of the class just alluded to, and the only
ones suited on the whole to the country, will come
without beckoning, and if these only stop twenty
years, and then return like the Portuguese, Brazil
will still obtain from them in this way not a little
capital both of sinew and gold invested in her
welfare. To be chary of English lives is quite
compatible with the wish that they should be
liberal with their money. Brazil wants the latter,
and England has even more than is good. There
124 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
is no need for her to quarrel with us because we
will not lay our bones in her bosom. Let her take
our gold and what we can give of energy instead.
Though loth to supply her with labour, we have
never stinted her in money, nor would we, seeing
how punctually she pays. Let there, then, be no
ill word between us because we are not anxious to
replace her slaves, for is she not our foster-child?
Were we not ally of her legitimate mother before
ever she was born or thought of ? Did not Coch-
rane, Earl of Dundonald, set her on her feet, esta-
blish her independence, deliver her from tutorship,
drive off her enemies ? Did not other Englishmen
help teach her to walk ? As she grew, did we not
reprove her vices, and by an Aberdeen Act and a
constant watch upon her coasts, compel her from her
darling sin ? Having purified her morals, did we
not drain and cleanse her capital, help largely to
construct her railways, roads, and docks, light her
with gas and journalism, carry her correspondence,
bank both with and for her, inundating her with
sovereigns on her simple I.O.U.'s? Do we not
take home her cotton, spin, weave, and return it to
the value of over four millions sterling, while meta-
morphosizing sugar into iron, coffee into wool, linen,
and sundries, to the value of some three millions
more ; taking, in a word, an approximate third of
her exports in return for a similar proportion of
imports supplied by us ?
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 125
Let us, then, keep up this already pretty close
connection, but beware lest it lead us beyond the
bounds Platonic. Let us rejoice in the business ties
that link us, and the solid profit we derive from one
another. Let us endeavour to maintain intimate
converse based on reciprocal advantage, the lively
interest engendered by esteem; but let us revolt
from combining to mix antagonistic breeds to the
production of objects of mutual reproach and obloquy.
Let us admire freely the soft Tupy, her feet in
flowers, humming-birds and butterflies about her
head ; but let the admiration be seasoned with dim-
deuce and chilled prudentially l>y worldly wisdom.
In this manner we shall not be prone to slip from the
safe footing of friendly intercourse and kindly offices,
into the alluring blandishments of a connection that
can only result in a projeny of Creole or even
mongrel Britons, effete examples of parental folly.
The world is wide and varied, and somewhere,
between the squat Lapp and giant Patagouian,
must produce a race fitter than the British to live
an agricultural existence in tropic South America,
a people more sorely put to for a choice of habita-
tion. May Brazil find and satisfy it. But before
all things, she must begin by sweeping away the
impediments and dispersing the phantom fogs that
scare colonists from her shores. She must set to
work to create a real attractive element within her
boundaries, instead of wasting money and reputation
126 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
on external propaganda, remembering that there is
no harder trial of merit than empty eulogy and
hyperbolical panegyric preceding trial. Though
they may make dupes, they can never make friends ;
they may increase the appetite, but are sure to be
followed by nausea and repugnance to simple food.
The energies and funds hitherto squandered in
driving in the guests should be expended in pre-
paring the table, when, if the door be but left open,
the savoury odour will itself be the most effectual
advertisement, the solid fare the best gag on hostile
criticism.
To name the most essential of these measures is
to recapitulate the burden of this sketch. Climate
and soil cannot be changed ; but these shortcomings
may be largely avoided by selecting for colonies
good specimens of the latter, and ceasing to expose
new-comers, through heedless selection of place and
time of debarkation, and neglect of proper prepa-
ration, to all the ravages of the former. Ample
and fitting accommodation, impartial agencies,
bureaux of information, accurate demarkation of
land, and secure title at lower prices than the present
facilities of transit to the various sites of saleable
territory, and development of their means of com-
munication by construction of roads and establish-
ment of regular lines of steam communication,
whether by land, river, or sea all this, together
with good maps and pamphlets, containing sound
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 127
and simple information, void of all splendid men-
dacity, will enable the Government to dispense with
much embarrassing interference in emigration
matters. The only European agencies allowed
should be the consulates, who might give as much
curt information, while assuming as little respon-
sibility, as possible. The very fact that a foreign
Government is answerable for his destiny saps the
best energies and paralyzes the self-reliance of the
emigrant. If a bridge existed between Cape Frio
and Cape Roca, half the anxious problem would be
solved. Men would wander into the Western land
on their own responsibility ; those who liked the
look of it would remain, those who did not would,
when they could, return, without a right to cast the
blame of their failure on anyone but themselves.
The presence, moreover, of this feeling with them
would often conjure of itself all chance of failure
from their path. Let Brazilians build such a
bridge, if not literally, by the best substitute
possible, subsidies to steamers in order to cheapen
passages to Brazil. Let a certificate from the con-
sulate suffice, without too close an examination, to
obtain still further assisted passages, and let them
rather be given freely to persons of all useful classes
proposing to stay over five years in Brazil, than
fixed at a very low rate. Independent of this, let
everything be done to reduce the cost of the voyage
to Brazil to build, in fact, the bridge.
128 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
The present race of Brazilians have received the
hideous polypus growth of slavery from their
fathers : they are aware of the danger from loss of
blood in too sudden amputation. They must, how-
ever, also remember, that there is as much risk of
ancemia or chronic deterioration of the circulating
fluid, where the cure is spread over too long a
period. The ligature already applied by the . late
emancipatory measures must be drawn tighter and
tighter by a fearless hand, for only when the fungus
shall fall severed to the ground will it be possible
for the body politic to assume a healthy condition,
and for the pure current of free and honourable
labour to circle in its veins. A high, and perhaps
progressive, tax upon all city slaves originally,
I believe, an idea of Count Jequetinonha would be
a judicious pull at the ligature.
As agriculture will have to bear the shock of this
great change, so it is the more essential that it
should be freed from a portion at least of the vast
share which is allotted it of the burdens of the
State. In any country the source of wealth must
be the source of revenue ; but there are other
branches of trade and industry, other fields in which
considerable fortunes are now made, on which it
would not seem unreasonable to throw, at least for
a time, a larger portion of the charges pressing so
heavily on the indebted Fazendeiro and his caffetal.
Such a policy would be perfectly consistent with n
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 129
tax on land, especially if calculated in inverse ratio
to its cultivation. It is the dead hand from which
the gold must be squeezed, leaving the living one
as free as can be for the work of life.
If there are some weighty laws peculiarly ob-
noxious to the emigrant,, especially the northern
emigrant, they are not many. In general, it is
rather with the administration of the codes than
with their context that there is room for much
amelioration. In such an empire, of nearly
5,000,000 square miles, and an independent exist-
ence of only half a century, some weakness and
corruption in the extremities, some sacrifice of the
principle to the person in remote provinces, is
inevitable ; and those who consider the blind and
bloody codes of a century ago in Europe ; the eva-
sions and arbitrary perversions of justice even now
practised in that venerable quarter of the world,
will not haste to throw stones. But when we come
to find just causes of complaint, such, for instance,
as the long delays consequent on insufficient provi-
sions for bringing prisoners rapidly to trial, in the
very capital, one of the most busy emporiums in the
world, the case is quite otherwise.
That the peculiar laws of succession to property,
especially in the matter of division, and in the effects
of marriage without contract, are prejudicial to many
colonists, and sometimes take them painfully by sur-
prise, there can be little doubt ; but it must be left
K
130 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
to Brazilian statesmen alone to consider whether a
compulsory division between the children be alto-
gether as likely as free testamentary disposition to
encourage in a young community the full improve-
ment and development of landed estates.
Legislation with a view to the complete dissipation
of all shades of social or political inequality or
distinction connected with religious differences, is
highly essential, and especially the speedy introduc-
tion of bond, fide civil marriage, unhampered by
saving clauses, and accompanied by facilities for the
due celebration and registration of the same. The
substitution of the monstrous labour law of 1839,
by legislation showing a sincere desire to defend and
protect the immigrant from all the harpies who may
desire to prey upon him, and from the imposition to
which he is exposed on first arrival in a foreign
land ; the reform of the present militia organization
and system of recruiting for the army, rendering it
impossible to pervert either into instruments of poli-
tical tyranny and of petty local persecution ; the
more perfect control and moderation of the autocratic
influence of the legion of delegados and petty police
officials ; measures calculated to ensure the integrity
and high character of the magistracy (juizes de paz
and juizes de orfaos), as also the morality and intel-
ligent devotion of the clergy ; the establishment of a
sufficiency of schools and churches ; in fine, all and
any enactments tending, by decentralization, to the
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 131
quickening of local life, to the extirpation of the
political weed which has overrun all domains of
national economy, and to the development in its
place of a vigorous communal and municipal growth,
in which foreigners should be admitted to a full
participation both in council and fruition all this
would indicate the inauguration of a policy likely to
do more to benefit and secure the future prosperity
and increase of the empire, than many gallons of ink
expended in vapid propaganda, or acres of surface
covered with the rosiest placards.
But though in this way Brazil may become
esteemed and respected, and her people multiply
and replenish her wildernesses, the calling and natu-
ral field for the English working-man lies, let it well
be understood, elsewhere. Not being Hobson, he
need not take Hobson's choice. ^Indeed, such has
hitherto so invariably been the fate of the white man
in the drowsy woods of tropical America, that I be-
lieve the Briton would be really happier, and truly
in more congenial circumstances, under the perpetual
scud and drizzle of the bleak Falklands, than amid
the enervating glories of a South American jungle.
But, after all, the Falkland Islands are not the
only British settlements, not to mention kindred
lands, open to the emigrant. Besides an absorption
of some 200,000 per annum by the United States,
Canada can, it would appear by the last Commis-
sioner's Report, absorb from 30,000 to 40,000 a year.
132 BRAZILIAN COLONIZATION.
Australia, New Zealand, and other colonies require
Englishmen. Queensland is even ready to give
gratuitous passages for certain classes. Both the
United States and the Canadian Pacific Railroad
schemes will give unusual advantages to emigrants
selecting allotments on their route. Pine-clad Van-
couver's is a queen of islands. The Cape has finer
diamonds than Minas; and for those that will sit
under palms at any price, is there not the gorgeous
archipelago of the West Indies, where one jewel sleeps
in the shadow of another ? Surely it were as well
to help indigent and wandering Englishmen to these
shores, as to expend equal sums in bringing Coolies
from the far-off East. For those who have a little
money or education there are territories occupied by
the Anglo-Saxon race where money gives 20 per
cent, interest ; and districts, such as the valleys of
California, where the fertility of the soil is only
surpassed by the almost frenzied activity of the
neighbouring ports.
But this glimpse of Saxon colonization prospects
in Brazil is no place for a catalogue of the colonies
and settlements of British race. A good wine needs
no bush ; and the forlorn fatuity which has guided
Englishmen to the sign of the Palm and Golden
Apples, can alone excuse John Bull from this once
hanging out a little one.
LONDON: I-IUNIKD BT EDWARD STAKFORD, 6
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