Book Description

The greatest of all American countries is comparatively the least developed. Brazil, with her 3,300,000 square miles of territory, four thousand miles of coast, and her incomparable system of great waterways, has the largest extent of wild and almost unknown country of any political division of the New World; she, and she alone, owns thousands of square miles of forests where no one has set foot but the native, still really living in the Stone Age, mountain ranges never properly prospected, with their deposits of minerals scarcely scratched, and millions of acres of grassy uplands waiting for the farmer and the stock-raiser. Brazil is not scantily developed because little has been done; on the contrary, a wonderful amount of development has been accomplished, but the period of expansion has been short and the country so great and varied that whole regions remain out of the track of progress. Until a century ago, when Dom João opened Brazilian ports to international commerce, Brazil lay in a trance, bound hand and foot to Portugal, isolated from the world. Her erection into a separate monarchy found her without capital, without education, for she had neither adequate primary nor technical schools, without a press, and without any knowledge of her own resources except that gathered by the interior raids, wanderings and settlements of her own hardy people. Everything that has been done to bring Brazil into the race of nations is the work of the last hundred years; the most intense period of rapid building since the establishment of the republic has lasted less than thirty years, for in that time has taken place the great acquisition of private fortunes in the industrial regions of Brazil. Much of the civic building, creation of public utilities, establishment of transportation lines, has been due to foreign capital and technical skill, but Brazil herself has contributed no small share of enterprise during the last fifty years; descendants of Portuguese fidalgos have taken up engineering, agriculture, commerce and city-making with energy and intelligence which is not always given a due share of recognition by those onlookers who think that all development of Latin America must come from without. In Brazil much progress, much creation, has come from within, and will come to an even larger degree in the future with improvement in technical education; but the country is enormous, the centres of population have always lain on or near the sea-border, and interior Brazil, the virgin heart of South America, remains practically untouched. The two great interior states of Matto Grosso and Goyaz cover an area of more than two million square kilometres; they make up one-fourth of the whole Brazilian territory, and Brazil covers half of South America: but this huge heart-shaped wedge in the centre of the continent has no more than half a million population. This is not because the country is tropical or worthless, but because it is unopened and unknown. Within her wide area Brazil encloses a great variety of soils and climates: she has no snow line, because she has no great mountain heights; a peak less than three thousand metres high, Itatiaya, in the Mantiqueiras, is the point of greatest altitude. But she has almost every other climatic gift that can be included within the fifth degree of North and thirty-third of South Latitude; between the eighth degree East and thirtieth West Longitude of the meridian of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil is a vast plateau with a steep descent to the sea along half her coast, and a flat hot sea margin of varying widths; this plateau, scored by great rivers, sweeps away in undulating prairies, sloping in two principal directions—inland, in the centre and south, to the great Paraná valley; and in the upper regions, northward to the immense Amazon basin. This is not a basin so much as a wide plate, for not only is the course of the huge rio-maralmost flat for the last thousand miles of its journey to the sea (Manáos is only 85 feet above sea-level) but this practically level ground extends northward all the way to the confines of Venezuela and the three Guianas, and southward until the Cordilheiras of Matto Grosso are encountered. Great expanses of this plate are filled with the sweltering forests of tropical tradition, forests containing a thousand kinds of strange orchids, immense and curious trees, insects, reptiles and animals; from Orellana and Lopez de Aguirre to Humboldt, Bates, Wallace and Agassiz, from the Lord de la Ravardière to Nicolas Hortsman the practical Dutchman who announced that El Dorado did not exist, to Charles Marie de la Condamine, Martius, Spix, Admiral Smith, Lister Maw, Schomburgk and Wickham, every traveller upon the Amazon has tried to describe the indescribable Amazonian forest. Deep, monotonous, silent, dark and changeless, the forest unconquerable walls in the uncountable rivers traversing it from the snows of Peru and the interior plateau of Brazil, closing in upon the little cities where man has settled himself in a puny attempt to steal treasures out of its mighty heart.