Brazil today and tomorrow

SUGAR

Sugar production is one of the Brazilian industries which have waxed, waned, and with the encouragement of high market prices abroad, has recently again forged ahead. As in the case of cotton, sugar can be and is grown in the great majority of Brazilian states, from the mouth of the Amazon down to the Laguna Mirim, but there are areas, chiefly on the central littoral, where soil and climate are so well suited to sugarcane that production from these regions is able to compete with other world offerings. There was a time when Brazil was the chief source of sugar supplies to Europe, but the industry suffered two great blows—one, the stimulation of cane-growing in the British West Indies, and again the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, which resulted in many instances in the abandonment of the plantations by a large part of the negro population, crowding into the coast cities to enjoy new liberty.

Cane production has all the advantages of an ancient industry whose details have long been reduced to an exact science. Its recorded history goes back to the fifth century, so that we can reckon that there have been fourteen centuries of experiment in cane culture. A native of Bengal, sugar was in cultivation in the fifth century along the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates; the conquering Moors took it into Spain in the eighth century, and during the following six or seven centuries its cultivation on a limited scale proceeded on the shores of the Mediterranean. In the fifteenth century when Portugal re-found and colonized Madeira and the Azores, sugarcane was introduced into these islands, flourished there, and yielded sugar to the home market in Lisbon. That it was an exotic luxury in Europe generally is proved by its price: a hundredweight sold in London in 1842 fetched £55. Twenty-five years later the price had dropped to ten pounds for a like quantity, but by that time larger supplies were coming in. After the discovery of the West Indian Islands by Columbus cane was introduced into Hispaniola and Cuba by the Spanish settlers, but cultivation was strongly discouraged by the home government, who chiefly aimed at the stimulation of gold-mining. Brazil, whose gold-deposits were luckily not discovered until the seventeenth century, became in contrast to New Spain an agricultural country from the time when the first capitanias were allotted: she began shipping sugar in the visiting Portuguese caravels in a few years after first settlement.

Thenceforth for over a century and a quarter Brazil became the main source of sugar supplies to Europe; when placer gold and diamond-bearing gravels were found by the bandeirantes everyone rushed to the General Mines taking slaves along, until the coast plantations were denuded both of masters and labourers. Consequent languishing of sugar production made it worth while for both England and France to develop cane growing in the West Indian isles which they had seized from Spain. It was in 1662 that the British “Company of Royal Adventurers of Africa” agreed to deliver three thousand slaves a year to the British West Indies, and sugar production in Jamaica, Barbados, etc., began to attract wealthy planters: whole fleets of high-prowed sailing ships came into Caribbean waters to take away sugar, rum and molasses in those palmy days, enduring until Napoleon started the beet-sugar industry and Great Britain, not long after, abolished the slave trade.

Europe only discovered her possession of a sweet tooth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before the great production of sugar from the New World began to be carried to Spain and Portugal, and by them distributed at high prices and in small quantities to the rest of Europe, the only sweetening known to the masses of the population was honey, and this was a luxury. There was no taste for sweets until sweets became common. The real taste of the Middle Ages was for spices; it is not generally realized today to what extent the food of Europe was at this period saturated with cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and other spices brought from the Orient. It was for the “Spice Isles” that the early navigators searched the wide seas, spices that they ate with a gusto almost incomprehensible today: they flavoured their beverages and scented their clothes with spices.

The most flourishing centres of sugar production in Brazil are in the State of Rio de Janeiro, where Campos is the focus of sugar deliveries, and Pernambuco, a thousand miles farther north; São Paulo has also an increasing sugar industry, as may be seen from the following list of large sugar mills; small factories, of which there are hundreds in Brazil chiefly turning out rapadura, a brown sugar-brick, and cachaça, the native rum, are not included:—

On almost every cotton, coffee, tobacco or other fazenda in Brazil, besides those given over to sugar production, one finds patches of the bright veridian green that demonstrates the presence of sugar, grown and milled for home uses; altogether the production of sugar in Brazil must be much larger than is shown by any statistics, and there does not exist any comprehensive estimate of the total amount. A few years ago the charge could be made that Brazilian sugar-milling methods were antiquated, extraction low because the machinery employed was inferior: but whoever repeats this tale today has not seen any of the huge, scientifically managed estates and mills of Pernambuco, the usinas of the country about Campos, where the sky-line is punctuated by slim chimneys, or any of the fine modern equipments of São Paulo. One of the first good mills that the writer saw in Brazil was at Piracicaba, in the interior of São Paulo, where an excellent product was marketed by the employment of thoroughly up-to-date methods. Here the installation of machinery is European, chiefly French, but there has been an increasing tendency since the outbreak of war in Europe towards purchases of American equipment, perhaps especially among the usinas of the northern promontory.

Exports of sugar from Brazil have fluctuated in an extraordinary manner since the beginning of this century; swift drops in amounts sent abroad have nearly always spelt “drought,” but there seems to have been a general tendency to decline until the stimulation of war prices helped the industry, due partly to formidable competition from the Caribbean islands and coasts, and partly to increased consumption in Brazil. A marked feature of the Brazilian sugar export lists is a developing sale to Argentina; it has been recently stimulated by the failure of Argentine supplies, but is also part of the symptomatic increase of interchange between the commercial South American countries. Brazilian sugar exports, shipped in bags of sixty kilos weight, 1906 to 1920 in round numbers:—

The price has ranged during this period from two hundred and twenty-five reis per kilo paid for the short crop of 1904, down to one hundred and eight reis paid in 1906 when the crop was large; from that low point it climbed upwards, fluctuating about one hundred and sixty to one hundred and eighty reis from 1907 to 1913, fixed exchange making this price the equivalent of about three and a half to four cents a kilo, or something like a cent and a quarter to a cent and three-quarters per pound. In 1914, with war prices encouraging the sugar market, the price rose to two hundred and twelve reis a kilo, and in 1915 to two hundred and forty-four reis, a figure exceeded enormously in the post-war boom of 1919–20.

The average yield of sugarcane per hectare in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo is fifty tons, or let us say something over twenty tons an acre; this does not compare with Caribbean coast yields, where eighty or ninety tons an acre is obtained from lands impregnated with volcanic ash, and fields are to be seen which have not been re-planted for a dozen years. Brazilian soils, chiefly composed of drifts of disintegrated granite, oxidized by the sun to a brilliant red tint, are sometimes very rich, but also are frequently just good honest soils that cannot stand abuse without exhaustion following; with proper rotation of crops these lands will yield generously, but it is scarcely surprising that, in regions where sugar has been almost continuously cultivated for a couple of centuries, the cane crop per acre is comparatively low.

Pernambuco, for instance, counts her cane cultivation from the year 1534, when the first engenho (sugar mill), piously named Nossa Senhora de Ajuda, was established near the settlement at Olinda.

Brazilians are large consumers of sugar; the internal consumption has been calculated at three hundred thousand tons a year, or some eighty to ninety pounds a head of the population, and, with the exception of fine sweets imported, chiefly from France, all of the sugar used in Brazil is nationally produced. The sugar growing and refining industry is in an exceedingly healthy condition, is one of the important national resources, and has shown marked revival during the last two years.

The use of tobacco in Brazil dates back an unknown number of centuries: the natives smoked the leaf, both in the form of rolled cigars and also in small quantities in wooden pipes, made in the fashion which Europe subsequently adopted. The first European to make any record of this habit was that painstaking Frenchman, André Thevet, who came to Rio de Janeiro with Villegaignon’s unfortunate expedition in November, 1555; he says that the native name for the plant was “betun” or “petum,” and the drawing in his book (La Cosmographie Universelle) identifies it with Nicotiana tabacum. In the Amazonian regions both men and women smoked tobacco as a recognized form of enjoyment, and its effects were so much appreciated by another traveller, Piso, that he declared it to be one of the three American plants which had no equal in the Old World for beneficial uses—coca, tobacco, and the root of mandioca. Tobacco-smoking by American natives had first been noticed by the crew of Columbus in 1492.

During the latter half of the sixteenth century Europeans began to take to the use of tobacco, the Spanish colonies sending it home from the West Indian Islands and the Portuguese from Brazil; it was not until about 1600 that it was seriously cultivated for export in the Brazilian capitanias, and when experiments were made with this object it was found that Bahia yielded the best product, although that of Pernambuco was also good, and the plant produced freely all along the littoral, from Amazonas to the lagoons of Rio Grande do Sul. Tobacco became during colonial days one of the important exports of Brazil, together with dyewoods and sugar.

Brazil marks her extensive cultivation of tobacco from about 1850, after her ports had been thrown open to world commerce and the flags of all lands were seen in her ports. In 1860 she exported 4,609 tons; in 1870, 13,276 tons and in 1873, nearly 17,000 tons, of which over 14,500 tons came from Bahia. By the year 1886 Brazilian exportation had risen to 23,000 tons, the value was over 15,000,000 francs (or more than $3,000,000) and a part of this to the value of 3,500,000 francs, “was returned to us made up into so-called Havana cigars,” remarks Almeida. “It was not fashionable to smoke any tobacco or cigars other than of the Havana kind in Brazil fifteen years ago.”

Now ideas have changed: Brazil realizes the value of her own product, and Bahia has no hesitation in challenging Vuelta Abajo to a comparison. Soils of the two regions are similar in qualities. Farther north, the Brazilian fumo has a stronger, less delicate flavour, and is largely consumed at home; cigarettes of Pará, Amazonas, Parahyba, Pernambuco, Matto Grosso, Minas, and many other states are manufactured in large quantities, and sold cheaply; very good Pará cigarettes made of the black local tobacco sell at ten for a “tostão”—a fraction over two cents.

By the end of the century Brazilian tobacco production had grown to some forty thousand tons, largely the result of ready markets in Germany, which practically absorbed the whole of this export until the outbreak of the European War, and the adoption of North American seeds and methods of cultivation. The output suffers fluctuations due to climatic conditions, as will be seen from inspection of the following figures; it will be noticed that prices have on the whole a tendency to rise:

In calculating prices it is well to bear in mind that the gold milreis is always worth twenty-seven English pence, while, although fixed between 1906 and 1914 at sixteen pence, the value of the paper milreis fluctuates. During 1915 it was worth an average of a fraction over twelve pence, so that the price of tobacco—eight hundred and thirty-five reis a kilo—may be considered as about eighteen cents a kilo, or a little over seven American cents per pound. While, as we have seen, thirty thousand tons of tobacco is exported each year from Brazil, enough remains in the country to supply ninety-six per cent of the internal consumption; cigars, tobacco and cigarettes are consumed in the country to the value of 40,622 contos, importations being worth only 1,500 contos of this amount.

Every state in Brazil has its large or small tobacco factories, but the great manufacturing region is that of São Felix, just across the bay from São Salvador (Bahia) city. Accessible to the factories established here are the finest tobacco regions: the product is excellent in flavour and well prepared for a discriminating market. Organizers of the manufacturing industry, as well as shippers to Europe, are largely German; German also is the big cigar factory of the South, that of Poock in Rio Grande do Sul, whose product goes all over Brazil.

Since the beginning of the European War the absence of German and Austrian shipping movement has paralyzed tobacco sales, and as this item forms about thirty per cent of Bahia’s exports it was necessary to seek unimpeded sales channels. Negotiations were opened with the Regie Française, the great French tobacco-buying organization, and the packing, quality, fermentation and other conditions studied with reference to sales.

CEREALS

Wheat growing is only possible on a commercial scale in the south of Brazil where temperature and climate are not unlike those of the European lands of origin of this cereal. At present Rio Grande is the only great wheat producing state, although Paraná has a budding industry; the great Italian firm of Matarazzo has recently acquired large areas of land in that state with the object of growing wheat and establishing a flour mill.

Rio Grande, which owes the major part of its opening-up to the German settlers who emigrated there about the middle of the nineteenth century, already grows half enough wheat to satisfy the internal needs of the State, for although she still imports 361,000 barrels of flour, and 236,000 bushels of wheat (equal to another 47,000 barrels) yet she also grows enough wheat to yield 407,000 barrels of native flour. She has, it is calculated, over 83,000 hectares of land under wheat, employs 29,000 field hands, and has over a thousand grain mills. Many of these are equipped with out-of-date machinery, and are small, but there are others fitted with good modern systems producing fine flour.

Two of the best wheat producing municipalities are Alfredo Chaves and Caxias, each of which have over four thousand hectares under wheat and produce an average of six thousand tons of this grain; the first municipality has fifty-one and the second sixty-seven mills. To show the “riograndense” growth in wheat production:

Santa Catharina is a cereal State, but does not today produce notable quantities; São Paulo, the high interior of Rio de Janeiro, and the hills of Minas, are all suitable; fine wheat, barley and oats are often seen in the vicinity of European colonies. But Brazilian production is not yet within measurable distance of coping with internal demands, and as a result wheat, with wheat-flour, accounts for one-fifth of Brazil’s total import values. The bulk of the grain imported comes from the River Plate.

Linked with the agricultural production of cereals is the flour-milling industry, which dates from the time when wheat entered Brazil free of duty while wheat-flour paid thirty reis a kilo: this was the condition of the tariff until December, 1899, by which time two large mills had been established in Rio de Janeiro. In January of the following year imported wheat was taxed for the first time, ten reis a kilo, while the duty on flour was reduced to twenty-five reis; national milling profits suffered correspondingly.

In 1906 other alterations were made in the tariff as regards flour from the United States, in addition to certain manufactured articles; it was suggested to Brazil that the United States was a good customer for Paulista coffee and Amazonian rubber, and that she expected “most favoured nation” treatment in return: a tax of three American cents per kilo against coffee was indicated as a short way with objectors. Brazil yielded, giving the United States a twenty per cent reduction on flour import duties, as well as for condensed milk, manufactures of rubber, clocks, dyes, varnishes, typewriters, ice-boxes, pianos, scales and wind-mills. Four years later the preferential tariff was extended to dried fruit, cement, school and office furniture, and in 1911 the rebate on flour entries was changed to thirty per cent.

As a result American sales of the goods indicated have increased very largely, although sales of rubber and coffee have remained, on Brazil’s part, about the same for the last seven or eight years; her more markedly larger shipments to North America are cacao and hides. But American flour imports into Brazil have increased from a little over twenty-four thousand tons in 1906 to nearly sixty thousand tons in 1920, with rises in other articles equally pleasant for the northern manufacturer—cement sales, for instance, increased from one hundred and twenty tons in 1908 to over 76,000 tons in 1920; but in 1921 Germany, selling 30% below her rivals, captured this trade. Reduction of taxes on American flour is actively opposed from two points; the first is the group of flour mills operating in the country, and the second in the sister republic of Argentina who also has flour to sell.

The flour mills in Brazil of commercial importance are eleven in number: the Moinho Fluminense and the Rio de Janeiro Flour Mills, in the city of Rio; Moinho Santa Cruz, across the bay in Nictheroy; Grandes Moinhos Gambas and Moinho Matarazzo, in São Paulo city; Moinho Santista, in Santos; there are three modern mills in Rio Grande State, at Pelotas, Porto Alegre, and Rio Grande City; Paraná has two, at Paranaguá and Antonia.^[14]

The great cereal of Brazil is that wonderful plant developed by the aborigines of the Americas, maize: it is commonly known as milho in Brazil. Only recently has the wild plant, mother of all the different kinds of maize in the world, been identified—a proof of the long culture which brought it to the perfection which the first European conquerors encountered; yet such was the hardihood of this cereal that thirty years after the Conquest it had spread all over the warm parts of Europe and was thriving in Africa and Asia.

It is, with mandioca, the great food of all South and Central America and Mexico, grows under almost any conditions, apparently, and while the seed is seldom carefully selected, strongly marked varieties of prolific habit are found in Brazil, the red, white and yellow all yielding well. It is found in patches outside every little hut, and in enormous fields in Central Brazil. In spite of the large importation of wheat nowadays to satisfy the more luxurious tastes of the cities, Brazil could not live without maize.

Rye is grown by the Russians of the southern colonies, and the south also produces a limited quantity of oats and barley.

FIBRES

Among the fibres of Brazil which are offered extensive markets is the wonderful paina, known in European markets as kapok, which is thirty-four times lighter than water and fourteen times lighter than cork. Produced chiefly in the Orient, its qualities were many years ago appreciated by German manufacturers who were until recently the largest purchasers of the fibre, using it for life-belts, mattresses, etc. Today an unsatisfied demand for kapok comes from the Société Industrielle et Commerciale du Kapok of Paris and London, which is said to expect enormous calls after the close of the war, when rehabilitated Belgium and northern France will need pillows, mattresses, coverlets, and quantities of other things with the qualities of lightness, warmth, elasticity and impermeability possessed by this renowned fibre. At present world supplies come from Java (best fibre, cleanest, best packed), British India, an inferior grade, as is also that of Central Africa and Senegal; a few years ago, at the suggestion of Germans interested in Venezuelan railways, the kapok tree was introduced there; but when the cotton was sent to Europe it was rejected on account of its condition “the greater part of the bales containing stones, refuse, etc., which sometimes amounted to thirty per cent of the total weight; thus, in spite of the fine quality of Venezuelan kapok, French importers were obliged to cease purchases,”—a lesson for careless exporters.

Many parts of Brazil display this beautiful tree. When the writer was first in Petropolis, in bright May weather, the avenues of that mountain city were gay with the large bright pink flowers of this grey-trunked, spreading exotic. Later, when the bolls ripen, the fibre is collected, sold by the kilo over many counters throughout the country, and used locally for stuffing pillows and cushions.

The price paid by France for paina fibre is about one hundred and forty to one hundred and sixty francs per hundred kilos of good-grade material: she imposes no duties against its entry. Brazil has many good fibres, but their extensive industrial use is as yet limited to aramina, of which coffee bags are made in S. Paulo, a flourishing industry, and the pita which is used by the Indians of Amazonas to make hammocks. These are woven with great art, interspersed along the edges with delicate feathers of gay-coloured Amazonian birds.

Fibre production in a scientific manner and on a commercial scale is only in its infancy in Brazil, but has recently shown interesting development. There are numbers of fine fibres native to the country, yielded not only by a large number of palms, one of which supplies the piassava exported for broom-making, but also by many plants of the aloe tribe. Some of these produce fibres equal in commercial value to the famous henequen (sisal) of Yucatan, upon which the rope-making industries of the United States so largely depend.

Banana fibre is used by the lace-makers of the north for the production of a curious, stiff, shiny lace of fairly intricate workmanship. The best specimens which I possess of this lace were bought at Maceió, but the great home of the lacemaker is Ceará. She usually works with linen or cotton threads, and is to be seen at every cottage door, with her pillow bristling like those of the Devonshire lace-makers, with scores of pins, while she throws the myriad bobbins to and fro, working her pattern on the pins.

Some of the lace produced is quite beautiful, of extreme fineness and intricacy, some of the most prized being the labyrintho, with its darned-in pattern of heavier, silky thread, among the fine filaments of the background. Lace-making is one of the small industries of Brazil which are little known, but deserve a better market.

CACAO

Cacao culture and preparation is the great absorbing industry of southern Bahia, where soil and climate, particularly along a couple of river valleys, combine to render the pretty little cacao tree fruitful. Not even coffee presents a more charming sight than a good cocoa plantation ready for harvest, the sun filtering through the light branches, and these, as well as the trunk thickly clustered with the big heavy red or yellow pods, looking something like elongated melons attached, almost stemless, to the strongest parts of the tree. Methods in use on many native plantations in Brazil are fairly primitive, and it is the exception to see the elaborate machinery for fermenting, washing, and drying such as is common in Trinidad; but the cacao produced is good, has a ready sale in a market which never seems to have too much cocoa and chocolate, and has made remarkably good prices since the European War began. Bahia is the great producing state, but Maranhão, Amazonas and Pará also send contributions to the export lists; the chief Bahian centres of production are Ilhéos and Itabuna, which send two-thirds of the crop, the rest coming from Cannavieiras and Belmonte primarily. The groves run inland for more than two hundred miles along the river valleys, full of the red triturated paste which is the base of Brazilian soil.

The cacao year is reckoned from May the first to April the thirtieth, and there are two gathering seasons: the safra proper begins in September and goes on until April, while the summer crop, the temperão, begins in May and has a less important yield. Practically, picking goes on all the year.

Cacao is native to the Americas, but its first cultivation and export from Bahia appears to date no earlier than about 1834, when there are records of shipments of 447 sacks of sixty kilos each. In 1840 the export was nearly 2,000 sacks, and in 1850 had risen to more than 5,000 sacks. In 1915 Bahia shipped about 750,000 sacks, as a result of the enthusiastic planting which has gone on in this favourable region for the last twenty years.

Until the war broke out the average price for six years for Brazilian cacao was about 725 reis a kilo—about seven cents a pound. It was at this price that Brazil sold an average of thirty-two thousand tons. In 1915 the price soared to 1$248 a kilo, or about twelve cents a pound, and Brazil with the biggest crop then on record exported 44,980 tons, a total exceeded in each of the following five years, 1919 showing exports of 93,000 tons, at 1$500 per kilo.

Cacao is a very good business, because there is seldom a surplus in world markets; a demand exists for every pound, and the populations of great centres seem to consume it in increasing quantities; it is a valuable food, against which as yet no analytical chemist has laid one of the charges that seem designed to warn us from most things that are agreeable to eat and drink.

Anyone accustomed to warm climates, with a little capital to invest, and able and willing to wait three or four years for his first returns, could do worse than to take up cacao planting in Brazil.

Agricultural methods in Brazil are in many regions quite primitive. When wild land is taken up, it is denuded by the axe of its big trees, and the small scrub disposed of by burning the land over. Frequently the next process is little more than that of making holes in the ground with a stick, dropping in seed, and waiting for it to come up: a fertile land, Brazil gets her crops with a minimum of trouble. That is all very well for the little owner of a small property, but it has already given way in more advanced districts to sound agricultural methods. Modern scientific agricultural implements of American and European make are commonly seen in the centre and south, but in the extreme north and the deep interior they are more rare. There is an excellent market for small, light hand ploughs, harrows and cultivators, for in some parts of the country, such as interior Rio, the land in the bottoms of valleys is very good, has been neglected because only coffee, planted on the hilltops, has pre-occupied the small farmer, but there is not sufficient flat space for the use of large motor or animal operated machinery. A campaign of agricultural instruction has been inaugurated for some years by the Department of Agriculture, some good statistics and maps and literature sent out, but perhaps less theory and more practical instruction is needed. A recent writer in the Estado de S. Paulo remarked upon this, rather caustically: “... instructions for the culture of squashes—plough the ground with a plough with a disc of such a number, harrow it with such or such a harrow, drill it with such or such a drill; afterwards fertilize it with so many tons of phosphate of lime, so many of potash, and a few kilos of powdered gold; cultivate it with such a cultivator, harvest the crop with such and such methods, and take it to market in a certain kind of motor-truck, et cetera, this ‘etcetera’ meaning that the farmer must hand over his farm to his creditors and go to hunt a job as sanitary inspector....”

Other countries have also suffered from a plethora of agricultural theory, but there is plenty of room for instruction of a practical character and several good agricultural schools in Brazil, notably that at Piracicaba, São Paulo, are leading the way.

There are many fine fruits in Brazil, unrecognized abroad, which may some day, with refrigerating spaces in outgoing vessels multiplied, find a way to international tables; there is already a pineapple export to Europe, arriving in time for Christmas, and Brazil’s sweet bananas are shipped to the Plate. But who realizes that Brazil is the native home of the finest oranges in the world? Bahia is the place of origin of the seedless orange; slips of this tree, taken to California, have created a tremendous daughter industry whose products are spread far and wide by steamer and train; there is no export from Brazil, the Bahian orange, which is greatly superior in size and flavour to the Californian, hardly creeping down the coast to the markets of Rio and São Paulo. There is room for a huge industry in growing and shipping in this direction, and some of the planters of California, trembling of nights when the frosts come and smudges have to be burnt—sometimes in vain, would do well to transfer their skill and energy to a land where frosts are unknown, land is cheap, and the best oranges known are produced without any great care or science.

MINING

Brazil was for more than a hundred years after the discovery of placer deposits in the interior the source of important gold exports; altogether she is estimated to have yielded gold worth more than a hundred million pounds sterling, but her fame diminished with the exhaustion of the gold-bearing river sands. It was easy enough to wash out gold grains with the bateia, but when it became necessary to seek mother lodes and to use machinery, native capital and technical skill were lacking. Two gold-mining companies are working today in Brazil, both British owned and operated, and both in the State of Minas Geraes. One, at Morro Velho, property of the S. João del Rey Mining Company, is worked at a depth of a mile and a quarter, pays dividends regularly, and is a standing tribute to British energy and skill: it is a magnificent social organization as well as an engineering triumph.

The second company of importance using modern equipment is that of Passagem, close to the old capital of Minas Geraes, Ouro Preto; it is excellently operated, but has not had equal good fortune with the Morro Velho mine. In 1916 Brazil’s gold exports, in bars, weighed 4,564,523 grams, were worth about £480,000, and went entirely to England, but Brazil subsequently forbade gold exports, and now takes over all the product.

A certain amount of Brazilian gold is absorbed internally every year by the excellent native goldsmiths, for the fabrication of special jewellery objects, but no estimate of the value is obtainable.

Until diamonds were found in South Africa Brazil was the cradle of the most important diamonds put on foreign markets; the stones are still sought by native garimpeiros, mostly, in the interior of Minas and Bahia, and from the grutas of the latter State are obtained the finest white diamonds known. But they have practically disappeared from export lists together with the black carbonados, even more valuable, for a reason commented upon by the Diario Official of Bahia, discussing 1915 trade: “If diamonds and carbonados have been, since the war, sent to Europe or North America, their exportation, which is for the most part unknown, has been realized by the habitual processes of smuggling.” Brazil is the main source of these “carbonados,” black diamonds of great hardness and therefore value, used industrially.

The precious stones openly shipped from all Brazil during 1915 were worth only about one hundred and seventy-six contos of reis (say forty-four thousand dollars), of which about fifty-five per cent went to the United States and the rest to France. During 1916 the export of precious and semi-precious Brazilian stones to North America has been greatly stimulated by the access of luxury-purchasing which has coincided with the accumulation of war profits, and out of American purchases of jewels from abroad at the rate of a million dollars a week Brazil has her share. The stones of Brazil have long been appreciated in Europe—I am thinking of a certain shop in the Rue de la Paix in Paris and another at the top of Regent Street in London—and deserve to be better known in North America; the diamonds are beautiful, and their distribution among not only the wealthy but the “middle” classes in Brazil is so usual, the possession of good diamonds is so universally considered the right of every woman, that a gala night at the theatre in São Paulo or Rio is a display of brilliant stones which would put, for choice jewels, many capitals of the world to shame.

The lovely sea-blue agua-marinhas, with exquisite transparency and lustre, the soft green tourmalinas, the pink and golden topazes and purple amethysts are all found in great quantities in the Brazilian interior: many are native cut, and the wheel of the lapidary using beautiful coloured stones may be seen at work in Bello Horizonte, Rio, Bahia, and São Paulo.

If half that geologists have said of Brazil is true, this country is destined to become one of the greatest mining regions of the Americas; it has an extraordinary variety of minerals, but their location in the interior where little transportation exists, added to the restraining influences of archaic mining laws, has checked enterprise. Before the European War began plans were well under way for development of important iron mines in Minas Geraes by an English company, but work is in abeyance at present. There has been, however, a marked increase in exports of high-grade manganese, chiefly from Minas, chiefly shipped away in the newly operating line of freight steamers owned by the United States Steel Corporation, which bring manufactured products to Brazil. Out of the total of more than three hundred thousand tons of this ore exported from Brazil in 1915, over two hundred and sixty-six thousand tons were sent to the United States, the price paid being over two and a half million dollars; Great Britain also took ten thousand tons, but Germany and Belgium, former customers for this ore, were eliminated from the lists.

During 1916 production, mainly from Minas deposits, rose to over five hundred thousand tons, again increasing to five hundred and thirty-three thousand tons in 1917; after this time depression was experienced, due in great measure to lessened demands from the United States using home-produced low-grade ores for steel hardening. Post-war prospects of development of the great Itabira iron deposits suggest iron and steel industries within Brazil.

Large manganese deposits also occur in the neighbourhood of Nazareth, on the mainland side of the Bahia de Todos os Santos (Bahia State), situated conveniently for shipment; its export was reduced to practically nothing from this point during 1914 and 1915, probably for the same reason that shipments of another famous Brazilian mineral, monazite sand, vanished about the same time from Bahian lists. This reason was the imposition of strangulating export taxes, amounting to about twenty-two per cent of the value of the mineral. Manganese deposits are known to exist, in addition to the beds in Bahia and Minas, in Matto Grosso, Santa Catharina, Paraná and Amazonas; the total quantity available is estimated at one hundred million tons.

Monazite sands lie all along the southerly shores of Bahia, extending into Espirito Santo; their peculiar glow and lustre was first noticed by an Englishman, John Gordon, who had samples examined and found that they contained thorium, used in making incandescent gas mantles; he was in the shipping business in Brazil, and had no difficulty in thenceforth sending large quantities of the precious sands abroad, as ballast; the story goes that only by an accident was the fact revealed to the authorities that the sands were valuable above the ballast of most vessels, after some years. Duties were put on, and eventually exports slumped. The largest amount officially sent abroad in one year was 2,114 tons, 1908, with a value of 609 contos of reis. In 1915 only 439 tons were exported, all to the United States.

These three meagre items, precious stones, manganese and monazite sands, complete the 1915 official mining exports of a great mineral country. Probably increases will be shown for the year 1916, for, in addition to manganese increases, there has been great stimulation of coal mining in the States of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catharina and Paraná. More than one Brazilian railway, exasperated at the prices demanded for foreign coal, has been using native coal and helping in its production, and during the latter part of 1916 experimental shipments were made to the Argentine. Results are said to be good, but a little caution must be used before serious claims are made concerning the existence of very extensive deposits of fine hard steam coal. In any case the production of useful coal is a blessing to the east coast of South America, devoid as this region has been up to the present of any source of reliable carvão de pedra; every ton has been imported, chiefly from Wales but latterly from North America. Chile, on the other side of the Andes, has been mining coal for years, but the quality is not satisfactory for all purposes, and supplies have been supplemented from Australia in normal times.

Brazil has, it is known, important deposits of nickel, copper, lead, mica, platinum, wolfram, and many other minerals, but there has been no real attempt at operations, and until prospecting is systematically undertaken and money put into good equipment, Brazil cannot take her place as a great mineral producing country. She has the minerals, but she needs roads to get them out, and favourable laws to encourage mining development, as well as abolition of strangulating taxes. With intelligent assistance, Brazil’s manganese should be able at the close of the European War to compete with that of Russia, and her monazite with that of Travancore (India), aside from the other rich deposits.

There is much controversy in Brazil on the subject of national manufactures. I have heard extremists declare roundly that Brazil ought not to manufacture anything at all, because each mill-hand is one more person taken away from the fields to which all Brazilian attention should be given.

“Brazil is an agricultural country,” a cotton planter said to the writer. “She cannot legitimately compete with the manufactured products of great industrial countries because the price of living is too high here. To obtain large revenues from the import taxes which are the Federal Government’s source of support we have heavy duties against large classes of goods entering the country; the barrier has been so high that it has been worth while for factories to be started here, sometimes making things from material produced in the country, which is not bad policy when we have enough labour, but often making goods every separate item of which is imported, an absurdity.”

He went on to say that there is a considerable manufacture of matches in Brazil, but that the igniting chemicals, the little sticks, and the boxes were all imported; nothing was done but the mere putting together. “It is only remunerative because the tax on imported matches is so high, and in many districts owing to want of communication the match factory has a monopoly of local trade—a purely artificial condition.” This fazendeiro was equally opposed to the silk and velvet factories of Petropolis, declaring that “every item, raw silk, colours, machinery, even the skilled weavers, are imported” and that until Brazil produces national silk—a beginning has been made—she should not have silk factories.