Prose (33 page)

Most of the [ … ] square miles are a vast, rolling plateau, with only one wave of mountain ranges that runs north and south, fairly close to the coast. The mountains are nowhere over 10,000 feet high, the highest near Rio de Janeiro. In the north they flatten out towards the Amazon, leaving more of the coastal plain for sugar-raising; in the south they flatten out into the Uruguay and Plata rivers, leaving plains for cattle-raising. But for most of the coast the line of mountains between the coastal plains and the higher, cooler interior has been the greatest of all hindrancess to the growth of Brazil. It forms a natural barrier that for four hundred years has kept all the cities and most of the population, as if encamped before a fortress, along the eastern edge of the country.

There is another big geographical handicap. There are great and navigable rivers, but they have never served to open up the country or help its economy to any great extent. Brazilians speak enviously of the Mississippi; if only they'd had a Mississippi things would be very different. It is probably true. Large freighters can go 2,300 miles up the Amazon, a river that makes the Mississippi look almost narrow, but that leads to no important cities or industrial centers. The second-largest river, the São Francisco, flows north, almost through the middle of the country. It, too, is navigable, but before it reaches the sea it is interrupted by the Falls of Paulo Affonso, and like the Amazon, it reaches no important cities, and serves for even less trade. Railroads have been built very slowly and for short stretches, serving one or two cities only. For centuries trade and communications were carried on entirely by coastal shipping, or mule trains over incredibly bad roads or trails. The air age is changing this state of affairs, and at the same time, or slightly later, trunk roads are at last beginning to connect the cities and towns from north to south, and from east to what few settlements there are in the west.

*   *   *

Brazil is still more than half-covered with forests. It contains, at a rough guess, more than fifty thousand vegetable species, and no one knows how many of these are potentially valuable to man. As well as all the fruits, native and early imported (like the banana), there are trees yielding: rubber, cacão, Brazil nuts, balsams, resins, fibres, cellulose, and tannin; and from the palm-trees alone, oils and waxes, as well as dates, coconuts, and palmito. There are many valuable and beautiful woods: teak, mahoganies, Jacarandas, satin-woods, and cedar—some woods so hard they can only be cut with special machinery.

As far as mineral resources go, the surface has barely been scratched. There is not much coal, and what there is is of poor quality—a fact that held back the railroads, and until recently, the growth of iron and steel industries. But—to quote from the staggering lists given in
The New World Guides
—there are: bauxite, bismuth, barium, asbestos, chromite, copper, gold, iron (15 million tons, approximately 25 per cent of the world supply), also “graphite, gypsum, kaolin, lead, limestone, manganese, marble, nickle, diamonds, zinc, radium, euxenite, mica, rock crystals, and tungsten.”

There is a national oil industry, Petrobras, getting under way, and the source of great dissension. But expert geologists, Brazilian and foreign, believe that there are probably no very large deposits of petroleum in Brazil.

But all this Ali Baba's treasure was hidden from the 16th-century explorers, in the future as well as underground. They kept on risking ships and lives for what Lévi-Strauss calls “derisory” articles: pepper and other spices; & from Brazil only wood and curiosities: dye-wood, animals, birds, skins, and a few Indians, too.

*   *   *

Then things began to change. The trip around the Cape of Good Hope was no longer profitable; Portugal discovered that “for every grain of pepper she gave a drop of blood,” and there were rumors of gold in Brazil. Around 1530, Portuguese fleets began coming regularly to patrol the coast, and to fight off the French and the Dutch, who also had designs on Brazil. A royal agent arrived and serious colonization began. The first town to be laid out was São Vicente, now an apartment-house-lined suburb of the port of Santos; the second Olinda, far to the north, now a suburb of Recife. (
O! Linda!,
that is “beautiful,” because of its white, palm-studded beaches.) The captaincies were granted, each about 150 miles along the coast and stretching inland indefintely until they met the equally indefinite lands of Spain. (Surely the biggest examples of “strip farming” on record.) São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, otherwise Bahia, became the capital, and it was in the region around Bahia that sugar was introduced and the plantation system first grew up. Negro slaves started arriving from Africa as early as 1535. As Lévi-Strauss says: “the world, gorged with gold, began to hunger after sugar; and sugar took a lot of slaves.” The Indians were too primitive; they knew only what now would be called an absolutely “permissive” life, in the shade of the forests; set to work, and in the sun, they simply died off.

In this first century, the French settled in and around what is now Rio, and were twice driven off. The second time the beginnings of the present city were laid out and given the name São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro, in honor of the saint on whose day the victory was won, in the month of January—although the “river” was non-existent. These first Brazilian coastal towns often have the simplified names that sailors would have given them: River, Bay (Bahia), Reef (Recife, whose inhabitants still call it “The” Reef), Fortress (Fortaleza), etc.

*   *   *

The next 250 years repeat the usual history of colonial rule, or mis-rule, in the 17th and 18th centuries. It resembles the history of the American colonies under the English, translated to a tropical setting, and a Catholic, slave-holding society, thinly scattered along a much longer strip of coast. While deriving great wealth from Brazil, the Portuguese crown monopolized Brazilian trade completely, and did its best to prevent the development of any independent industries. There were unjust taxes and restrictions: the inevitable salt-tax, and high duties on all imported goods, and yet everything
had
to be imported from the mother-country since no manufactures were allowed except the simplest home industries. A particular grievance was textiles: except for the roughest stuffs, worn by the slaves, no cloth could be woven. No printing presses were allowed, so there were no journals or newspapers, and very few books. Gold was discovered, at last, but goldsmiths were forbidden to work it. Over and over we read of the smiths' forges being destroyed, but the treasure still in the sacristies of the old Brazilian churches proves that this restriction must often have been evaded.

The Jesuits, who came in great numbers during the first hundred years, tried to protect the Indians from slavery in the captaincies, They gathered them into large societies, called “reductions,” each around a church, converted them, and taught them,—in other words, “civilised” them. Undoubtedly they did save thousands from slavery or slaughter, but the Indians died off, anyway, from small-pox, measles, and inanition, and their culture, primitive but unique, and their skills and arts died with them, or blended gradually into that of Portugese and African newcomers.

*   *   *

The first event that could be considered “national,” implying a sense of identity and a small amount of cooperation between the northern settlements, at least, was the final driving out of the Dutch. For twenty years they had controlled the northern coast, and at the same time they had conquered the Portugese African colony of Angola, since they, too, needed Negro slaves and in the 17th and 18th centuries eastern Africa and sugar-raising northern Brazil were complementary. The Dutch had taken over the port of Recife as their capital, re-named it Mauritzstad, for the governor, Count Mauritz of Nassau-Siegen, and built it up “in the fashion of Holland,” according to a city-plan, from 150 houses to about 2,000. Dutch forts can still be seen on the lower Amazon, and high, stepped, Dutch roofs in Recife. But they were finally driven out for good in 1654, a triumph for the Catholic Church and for Brazil. (Some of these Mauritzstad-ers eventually settled in New Amsterdam, i.e., New York City.)

*   *   *

After almost a century of rumors and occasional lucky finds, gold and silver and precious stones were at last discovered in quantity in what is now the State of Minas Gerais (General Mines). It was there that the first real expansion and development of the interior of Brazil took place, and almost entirely owing to the efforts of the famous
bandeirantes.
They came from around São Paulo, descendants of the Portuguese and the Indian girls, and they were energetic, cruel, and rapacious. They travelled in armed bands, “
bandeiras,
” along with their wives, children, cattle, and Indian slaves. They made long treks and savage raids, for gold and for more slaves, for trading—even attacking and destroying the Jesuit “reductions,” and carrying off their own blood-brothers into slavery. They penetrated far into the present States of Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Mato Grosso (the still almost “far-west” city of Cuiabá was originally one of their trading posts), and the discovery of the more glamorous parts of Brazil's mineral wealth was almost entirely due to them.

A small but brilliant constellation of mining towns grew up after the
bandeirantes.
“Mining town” suggests something quite different, however, from these miniature cities,—wealthy, isolated, small out-posts of 18th-century culture, and filled with late, beautiful examples of baroque architecture. Vila Rica (now Ouro Prêto, or “black gold,” named for a dark, reddish gold) was the capital, and there were many more: Mariana, São João del Rey, Morro Velho, Queluz, to name a few. Diamantina, now almost unknown outside Brazil, was famous all over Europe as the diamond center of the world, until the discovery of the Kimberley lodes in Africa in 1870. During the century of the mining boom, a million slaves are supposed to have gone into this region alone, and the wealth rivalled that of the bigger, older, sugar capital of Bahia in the north.

But it was in this group of small, flourishing city-towns that the most important event of the 18th century took place, an event that should be of particular interest to Americans. It was an abortive and tragic attempt at independence from Portugal, called by the odd name of the “Inconfidencia Mineira,” meaning, more or less, the Minas Conspiracy. The standards of culture and education in these towns were probably higher than in any other part of Brazil at the time, and besides miners—rather mine-owners—there were lawyers and army officers and teachers. A group of six of these young men were all poets and thought of themselves as a “school,” not only that, but in those barren highlands, glittering with ores, they thought of themselves as Arcadians, took pastoral pen-names, and actually wrote pastoral poems—and epics and satires as well. It seems as though artificiality could not go much further—however, there were real talents among them, and they also were interested in politics, and particularly the recent successful American War of Independence. They were joined by other intellectuals and army officers, and their leader was a young lieutenant, Joaquim José da Silva Xavier. He occasionally practised dentistry and so was known as “Toothpuller,” Tiradentes. He carried the American Declaration of Independence about with him in his pocket and liked to read it out loud. The group corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and finally one of them was sent to meet him in France, where he was minister plenipotentiary. Jefferson, on a trip for his health, met him cautiously in the Roman ampitheatre at Nîmes. Samuel Putnam, in his book about Brazilian literature, MARVELOUS JOURNEY, says: “this event, although most North Americans have never heard of it, has since become for Brazilians one of the strongest bonds between their democracy and our own.”

Asked his advice about how to foment a revolution and found a republic, Jefferson, apparently, as a diplomat, could promise nothing more than his moral support. The envoy who met him died on the way back to Brazil, but the conspiracy in Minas went ahead and grew over-bold. It was found out, and all the
“Inconfidentes”
were drastically punished. One committed suicide, most were sent into exile in Angola, and Tiradentes himself was brutally executed, being hung, drawn and quartered. His house was destroyed and the ground where it stood was sprinkled with salt, in the good old medieval way.

The little “School of Minas,” if it can really be called a school, was wiped out, and not only was the first Brazilian movement for independence destroyed but also the first real attempt at a literary movement in the country. The brave but impractical “Arcadian” poets of '89 could not arouse their country or do battle like our hard-headed small farmers of '76. But Tiradentes has remained the greatest national hero of Brazil; “Toothpuller Day” is a holiday; almost every town in Brazil has its Tiradentes square or street; and rebellion against Portugal had begun, although independence was not to come for thirty-three more years and then not in the form of a revolution at all.