Brazil today and tomorrow

I. River and Road

All the great railway systems of Brazil are pioneers, lines of penetration, driving into new country like hopeful explorers, and starting from one of the old centres of population on the sea-border. Within the last few years links have been completed between some of the cities where the lines originate, so that there are now long strips of line running parallel to the coast, and thus Central and South Brazil are benefited by this junction so far as it exists: but for several neighbour states the only means of communication with each other is the sea.

The Brazilian, descendant of the seafaring Portuguese, is a good waterman by instinct; thousands of little sailboats navigate the sea margin of Brazil, homebuilt, doing an active petty traffic in raw materials and fruit and merchandise. This traffic figures in Brazilian statistics as cabotagem. Passengers of a humble class are carried in addition to freight and there is also a fishing fleet attached to every sea town, so that the total of Brazilian vessels of this useful little class is large.

When the first hardy Portuguese and their descendants the mamelucos began, very early after the acquisition of a few strips of coast by the first captains, to penetrate the interior of the Land of the True Cross they used the rivers as highways. The settlers of São Paulo sailed their canoes on the Tieté, the “sacred river of São Paulo,” and it was a facile system of exploration because this river flows inland from the heights of the mountain barrier where it takes its rise; running north-west for four hundred miles it joins the great Paraná and thence continues southward, finding its way to the sea as part of the Rio de la Plata. The water systems of the east coast of South America are so enormous and so closely linked that it is possible, with but a few miles of portage, to traverse a river path all the way from Buenos Aires in the Argentine to Pará in North Brazil, a journey of some four thousand miles.

What the Tieté was to the pioneer Paulistas, the slave-hunting indomitable bandeirantes, the São Francisco was to the early colonists of Bahia, no less energetic, fearless and predatory. This noble river rises in the mountains of Minas Geraes, flowing north and eventually turning east towards the sea and forming the renowned Paulo Affonso Falls. When the mineral riches of the “General Mines” were discovered this river became a busy highway of travel, the Bahianos flocking to the regions of gold and precious stones in such numbers that the coast settlement was almost deserted.

It was during this period of gold fever that two of the very few good roads in Brazil were constructed: one ran between Rio de Janeiro and the first capital of Minas, the mining town of Ouro Preto (“Black Gold”), and along it caravans travelled weekly, bringing out ore and hides and taking in slaves and merchandise. Villages which sprang up along the line of this old highway still exist although the road itself has long fallen out of repair, and one, Juiz da Fora, has grown into an important well-built town, the centre of a mining and agricultural section now served by a railroad.

The other road which owed its construction to the exciting tales from the gold camps ran between São Paulo city and the mines; its existence was limited by the days of prosperity of the gold-seekers, and when the rich deposits of alluvial gold were exhausted and the batea had perforce to be exchanged for the spade, the road was abandoned. The ill luck which attended the pitched battles of the Paulistas with other claimants to the General Mines caused the withdrawal of many fortune seekers back to the plantations of S. Paulo and hastened the decay of the highway.

Another of the few much-travelled roads of the colonial or indeed any period of Brazilian history, until the opening of the flat lands of the extreme south by imported European colonists, was one built by the Jesuits from the coastal colony of São Vicente to their own mission settlement at São Paulo; this highway negotiated the mangrove swamps of the flat belt edging the sea and then climbed the rocky barrier of the Serra do Mar to the cool interior plateau. Before the construction of this Caminho do Padre José the ascent must have taxed even the stout spirits of those indomitable priests. The good Padre Vasconcellos wrote, three hundred years ago, of the journey:—

“The greater part of the way one cannot really travel, but must make one’s way with hands and feet, clinging to the roots of trees, and this amongst such crags and precipices that I confess I trembled whenever I looked downwards. The depth of the valleys is tremendous and the number of mountains rising one above another appear to leave no hope of reaching the climax.... It is true that the labour of the ascent has its compensations now and again, for when I rested upon one of the rocks and looked below it seemed as if I were gazing from the heaven of the moon and that the whole round universe lay spread beneath my feet.”

When Fletcher (Brazil and the Brazilians) visited São Paulo in 1855, he made the trip from Santos on horseback over a Serra road, remarking on the excellence of the section on the flat to Cubitão; he was two days on the journey and says that the road “which traverses this range of mountains is probably the finest in Brazil, with the exception of the Imperial highway to Petropolis.”

This was not the first road constructed to bridge the barrier range, for in 1790 the Portuguese Governor superseded the Jesuit highway by a new one which included four miles of solid pavement and had more than one hundred and eighty angles before it reached the plateau. It was still too steep for wheeled traffic and the troops of mules which traversed it in thousands, bringing coffee from the interior after this product became a commercial factor and before the railway was built, often slid down the steep slopes on their haunches. It is said that both this and the first road were lined with the bones of mules that died by the way.

Similar stories are told of the Imperial road, built by that genuinely progressive ruler, Dom Pedro segundo, from Rio de Janeiro to his pet colony and residence Petropolis, a lovely nook in the heart of the Serra behind Guanabara Bay. This road, too, traversed flat, marshy ground before it began to climb the terrible Serra, and the latter section remained in use for some years after a railroad was constructed over the flats to the foot of the mountains: engineering difficulties were considered too great for a railroad until eventually Swiss engineers applied the same methods as had solved the problem in their own mountain country.

Many people in Brazil talk of the old coaching days in Petropolis, when stout mules toiled up the sharp gradients with their loads of passengers and freight. The team was changed in Petropolis and the route pursued on into Minas Geraes. This road is still in good condition—Petropolis the flower-decked and spotless is a centre of fine valley roads leading in seven different directions—and is a panorama of charming scenes. Like its sister mountain road in São Paulo and the “Graciosa” road from Curityba in Paraná, it has entered upon a new lease of life with the coming of the automobile.

Will the entry of the cheap automobile develop road-making in Brazil as it has assisted in that good work in the United States? It is possible. Before the War, the chief importation of motor-cars was from Europe, the class was high grade, beautiful and extremely powerful. It is said that no city in the world can show more expensive high-power cars than Rio de Janeiro, where every hired machine is called upon to climb the steep grades of Tijuca or some neighbouring mountain. There are large numbers of such cars also to be seen in wealthy S. Paulo, but they do not go far from the Avenida Paulista for lack of good roads; the luxurious European car does its chief duty within city bounds.

But with the introduction of the inexpensive car of North American build, the fazendeiro is acquiring a car for country use. It seems certain that what may be called the agricultural use of such cars will help to bring about improvement in interior highways that was not necessarily called for when a trusty horse or mule could negotiate any kind of a boggy track. At the same time it is not to be expected that Brazil will soon be extensively traversed by great high roads such as France possesses or such as the Romans left in Britain. The climate of half the country opposes itself to road permanence with all the force of the tropics. Burned and disintegrated by fierce sun, deluged and beaten by even fiercer rains, choked by the lush growth of a soil so fertile that a tangled green maze springs up almost overnight in any cleared space, a road has poor chance of surviving in many parts of Brazil unless unceasing labour and unending money is spent upon it. In the very regions where roads are most wanted on account of lack of other transportation means, there is usually the least chance of money being raised for their upkeep. In thinking of possible Brazilian highways, it is necessary to eliminate from present consideration much of the great teeming forestal belt of the north, and the precipitous Serra regions of the south sea-border; the areas where automobile roads could be built with a chance of permanence without exhausting expenses in upkeep are the flat lands of the north, where some excellent plans and beginnings have been made in Bahia and Pernambuco; part of Minas, where the Triangulo already has a public automobile highway service, connecting Uberabinha with the railway; the wide uplands of S. Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catharina and Rio Grande do Sul; and the interior plateau of Goyaz and Matto Grosso.

The proof that permanent, and not too costly roads, can be made in Brazil lies in the fact that they have been made: the Russian carters of Paraná take their teams over rough but serviceable trails on prairie lands, and across the high sertão of Matto Grosso that great and gallant explorer, Rondon, has built roads over which services of automobile trucks are maintained for the convenience of the telegraph building, geological and charting work of the Commission. The tale of the magnificent work in the interior done by the Rondon Commission is an epic of the Brazilian interior, and one of its great merits has been the proof that this unknown country is no terrible jungle, but an open, honest country awaiting the plough.

II. Rail

Initiative in railway construction in Brazil is credited to a clever priest who acted as Regent during part of the minority of Pedro II. In October, 1835, Padre Feijó presented a bill to the Legislative Assembly in Rio de Janeiro advocating the creation of a railway system; amongst other suggestions his scheme included a limitation of rates for freight and passengers—the former to a maximum of twenty reis for each arroba carried a league, and ninety reis for each passenger carried a like distance. Nothing was done for seventeen years, and then in June, 1852, the Brazilian Government sanctioned a concession for a railroad to link the port of Pernambuco to a point upon the river S. Francisco, above the falls which blocked the way of boats traversing the busy interior river highway. This road was never built. In 1853, another concession was granted for a line to reach the river from the more southerly port of Bahia: this plan was carried out and the road opened to traffic (Bahia to Joazeiro) in the year 1860, but before that day three other railways had been built and brought into operation.

The first of all railways to operate in Brazil was the Emperor’s road running from the outskirts of Rio city across level ground to the foot of the Serra: it was opened in 1854. This, and the subsequent mountain climbing section extending from the Raiz da Serra to the Alto da Serra, are part of the important system of lines owned and operated by one of the big English companies, the Leopoldina: I refer in detail to this series and its development work on another page. A short strip, now part of the (English) Great Western of Brazil Railway, running on level country from the city of Pernambuco was opened in 1857, and a line from Rio de Janeiro to Queimados, a distance of sixty kilometers, was opened to traffic by Dom Pedro in the year 1858: it forms part of the valuable series of penetrating lines owned and operated by the Federal Government today.

Before 1870 the most important producing states, the seaboard territories with surplus sugar, coffee, tobacco, cacao and cotton had been furnished with strips of line penetrating limited areas of the interior. In the north engineering problems were easier, for the frowning wall of the Serra do Mar melts away in South Bahia, but it was in the temperate zones of the more southerly regions that transportation was urgently demanded to serve the needs of the rapidly expanding coffee regions; São Paulo was feverishly planting all over her best red lands, and the only outlet for the crop was the steep mountain road to Santos. An English company took up the work of building a railroad, completed it after surmounting a series of difficulties and opened it to traffic in 1867. It is a triumph of engineering, and has never had a competitor; from S. Paulo city itself a fan of railway lines branches out in every direction except seawards, and while other great centres of rail networks in Brazil originate at the sea edge, here in S. Paulo the point of departure is from the plateau above the hill barrier. The São Paulo-to-Santos line is world famous: it is the channel through which the bulk of the coffee of the whole world is carried, and is for its length one of the notable money earners of the railroad world. The road crosses the coastal swamps following the old Jesuit road as far as Cubatão, and thence climbs the granite wall of the Serra on one of the steepest grades known in railway construction, rising two thousand five hundred feet within a distance of ten kilometers. It is a joy to ride over this line, with its magnificent equipment, minute neatness, drainage system of the mountain sides involving a remarkable series of cemented channels—the very rocks beside the track are tarred to preserve them from decay, and the sides of the hills are built up with elaborate care unparalleled in railway work; the company’s power-houses, cottages for employees, and stations along the route, with the fine terminal in Santos and the beautiful “Estação da Luz” in S. Paulo, are models. Once upon a time, it is said, an American railroad man was shown over this line and asked if he could suggest any improvements. “Not unless the ends of the ties could be carved or the rails set with diamonds,” replied the visitor.

Upkeep of the line is costly, soil and climate working against durability of any human effort; the climb up the steep Serra, electrically operated by rope haulage on the “endless rope” system, requires incessant watchfulness, as does the condition of the several tunnels blasted through the heart of the mountains. There is no better way to appreciate both the engineering problems and the superb beauty of the green Serra with its abrupt peaks and deep valleys than to ride on the brake of a train making the descent to Santos.

The distance between Santos and S. Paulo is about seventy-nine kilometers, but the company owns branches, and there is a duplication of the track, the result of reconstruction and the choice of a new route for the Serra ascent in 1901, which brings the total length of line owned to one hundred and fifty-three kilometers; the old track may be seen below the new one on the hillside, and is being electrified with a view to renewed activity as a freight carrier. The enormous volume of Paulista coffee seeking an outlet by the line—17 million bags in 1915–16—is a strain upon capacity in the busy season; the exports of S. Paulo are also developing in a new direction with the entry of Brazil into world markets with chilled beef, and refrigerator cars are monthly increasing in traffic over the road.

The capital of the company, whose headquarters are in London, is six million pounds sterling, and up to the year of war in Europe a dividend of fourteen per cent was regularly paid: in 1914 twelve per cent was paid, and in 1915 there was another drop to ten per cent, chiefly consequent upon the fall in Brazilian currency which caused heavy losses when earnings counted in milreis were turned into sterling for remittance to Europe. Lowered exchange has caused serious embarrassment to most companies operating in Latin America with foreign capital, especially the transportation companies whose rates are fixed, and it was loss on this account rather than reduced business which brought gloom into railway and street-car circles in 1915.

There are three railways which climb the mountain wall of South Brazil: the first was the São Paulo line, and the second the Petropolis link, built on the rack system; some wonderful views are passed on the two-hour journey. The third mountain climbing line connects the port of Paranaguá to Curityba, in the State of Paraná, some three hundred miles south of Santos. The construction of this line was as remarkable a feat as that of the São Paulo railway, and is even more spectacular; it was only completed after the first daring attempt had failed, and today the line hangs breathlessly on the sides of mountain precipices, traverses canyons on apparently frail bridges, and plunges into tunnels blasted through granite. The Serra is extremely steep in the region traversed by the railroad and the scenery is quite the most wild and beautiful of the Brazilian mountain barrier. The line is the outlet for the products of the mills of industrious Curityba, and from here the herva matte of the interior woods of Paraná is sent to Paranaguá and thence by boat to its chief destination, Argentina. Paraná and the neighbouring forests comprise almost the sole source of supply of matte leaves, and thus the mountain line has a practical monopoly in the transportation of this wild product; if recent Argentine plans for planting the shrub are successful a heavy blow would probably be dealt to this industry.

Brazil built her first railway three years before the Argentine brought her first line into operation—a modest strip of thirteen miles running west from Buenos Aires—although British Guiana has the credit of possessing the earliest railroad of South America; during the Empire construction proceeded steadily but with a certain caution, and it was not until after the formation of the Republic in 1889 that floods of concessions for railway construction invaded Brazil. The years 1890–91 show the highwater mark of such plans, and while many of these dried up without leaving a trace there remained sufficient impetus for much genuine and useful construction.

Lines began to go farther afield, to form networks and connected links; they were part of general improvement plans which presently included harbours and wharves, waterworks and sanitation schemes, city paving and draining and beautifying. It is true that from the time of the Republic is dated Brazil’s plunge into debt upon a great scale, but since the new American countries could not wait until they had sufficient money in the national pockets to pay for railway, harbour and sanitation, and Europe stood ready to lend her surplus gold in aid of the work, Brazil is scarcely to blame for borrowing as did her sisters, north and south. Her very extravagance helped to advertise and advance Brazil, the royal-spending world customer with rich products for sale to justify her; she attracted immigrants, merchants, capitalists, technical men and scholars as she never would have done without her renown as a land of careless magnificence.

Borrowing and building went on without any serious check until 1912, when the first Balkan War cast long shadows into the financial world; less than two hundred miles of new railway line have come into operation since that year in Brazil. But the previous fat years, many more than seven, had by that time not only brought about rail access to many fertile interior belts, but also the linking of the more important systems by lines reaching up and down the coast. The brilliant French author, Pierre Denis, was able to say ten or twelve years ago that there was “no general railway system in Brazil; there are small independent systems, covering with their meshes the regions of long-established colonization, but without inter-communicating lines.” He found connection between two groups only, remarking that “the line from S. Paulo to Rio is today the only means of transit between two groups of states, excepting the ocean highway.”

At the end of 1922 the situation is greatly changed. Not only have many states been linked up but three sister Republics are in direct communication with Brazil by rail. São Paulo city communicates by systems under allied control with Uruguay; Argentina is in touch at the western edge of Rio Grande do Sul, where the town of Uruguayana stands on the river boundary between the two countries opposite to the Argentine port of Libres; Bolivia is reached at the frontier town of Corumbá, on the border of south-western Matto Grosso, as well as at the Madeira-Mamoré Falls in the north. Linking up with south-eastern Bolivia is the result of the penetration of south Matto Grosso by the North-Western of Brazil Railway; this line, which has direct communication with the city of S. Paulo, reached Itapura on the river Paraná a few years ago, and pushed on energetically from that western edge of S. Paulo State across the narrow southerly neck of the huge neighbour, arriving early in 1916 at Porto Esperanza on the river Paraguay, only a few miles from the objective of the road, Corumbá town on the frontier of Bolivia. This transportation service gives Bolivia an outlet of which the interior republic has stood in need since she was deprived of a seaport of her own on the Pacific; perforce sending her products out through other republics, Bolivia has been already aided in the north with the opening of the Madeira-Mamoré line, giving better access to the river highway of the Amazon.

The North-Western line has pushed farther afield from the seacoast than any other in Brazil: the constructing company is Belgian, with headquarters in Brussels, and the Federal Government in this as in many other instances guarantees interest on the capital expended, a loan having been raised for this purpose in Paris in 1909. An able Brazilian engineer, Dr. Firma Dutra, directs the work; all the rolling stock, including dormitories and restaurant cars, has been built in Brazilian workshops with Brazilian hardwoods. Another approach, parallel to and south of the north-western, to the great stock-raising lands of Matto Grosso is offered now that the extension of the Sorocabana line from Salto Grande to the port of Tibiriça on the Paraná river is completed; Tibiriça is a famous cattle crossing where thousands of head of the stocky beasts reared on luscious interior pastures are brought into the State of S. Paulo. Their numbers have been greatly augmented since the opening of two packing-houses in S. Paulo at the end of 1914, and excellent service has been rendered by the Paulista enterprise, the Companhia de Viação São Paulo-Matto Grosso, which owns the port of Tibiriça, operates ferries, runs a steamboat service up the Paraná river to Jupiá (Itapura) where the North-Western brings merchandise from S. Paulo city, as well as service on three or four tributaries of the Paraná; the company has constructed a highway, now bordered with coffee plantations, rest-pastures for the passing cattle, and embryo villages along the route, all the way to the city of S. Paulo.

There are three chief fans of radiating railroad lines in Brazil, starting from the coastal border from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Pernambuco. The first two form networks of lines of much greater extent than the third, and besides these systems there are several points along the littoral where a railway penetrating inland is already the handle of a new fan. The southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, is well served, lines running through the middle of her territory from north to south (the Auxiliaire, now part of the Brazil Railways group) and east to west, so that the state is in touch with Argentina, with Uruguay, with the States of S. Paulo, and Santa Catharina and with the seat at each end of the Lagôa dos Patos, a busy lagoon with the town of Rio Grande at the entrance and Porto Alegre at the northern end: the railroad splits into two at Cacequy in order to serve both the rival ports. Superior docking at Porto Alegre sent practically all visiting vessels to the upper end of the lagoon until the end of 1915, when the new harbour of Rio Grande was formally opened. The work, a long and expensive series of tasks, was performed by a French company, and includes the deepening and maintenance of the channel to permit the entry of deep-draught vessels, docks and wharves; Rio Grande is a fine state with a cool climate, an industrious population, and thriving business. It has been carefully colonized with white European settlers, has space for a million more, and with its easy access to other centres of population by sea and rail has much to attract newcomers. Increasing exchange is carried on with the Argentine, chiefly by water.

Santa Catharina’s rail service consists of the north-and-south link of the São Paulo-Rio Grande line, a short local line between the colonies of Blumenau and Hansa, and two short strips running inland from the sea, one from Imbatuba to Laguna and thence inland to Lauro Muller, serving the coalfields of that region; the other from the excellent little island port of São Francisco, across to the mainland at Paraty, and thence inland to Joinville, Rio Negro and Tres Barras, where the lumber yards of a company controlled by the Brazil Railway Company feed it with freight. The Tres Barras yards operate with the Paraná pine for which the southern States of Brazil are famous, ship it to many other parts of the Brazilian Union, and in 1915 arranged to supply Argentina alone with forty million feet a year.

S. Francisco port has entered upon a new life since the lumber business has been flourishing; a double row of settlements has sprung up beside the track of the railroad and agriculture is showing development in a region that has been steadily if slowly settled by the descendants of the early colony of Joinville.

The State of Paraná is better off for connections; in addition to the north and south link with the sister states of São Paulo and Santa Catharina, she has a railroad running off from it at the station of Ponta Grossa due east to Serrinha (whence a branch connects with Rio Negro directly to the south), on to the pleasant capital town, Curityba, and down the wonderful mountain road already referred to until the port of Paranaguá is reached, one of the lively younger shipping points of the southern littoral.

São Paulo, the next state northwards, is the possessor of the best system of penetrating railroads in Brazil: she has more mileage than any other single state in the Union, counting over four thousand miles. In his Message read before the S. Paulo Congress on July 14, 1916, the President of the State, Dr. Altino Arantes, remarked:

“During the past year we had an addition of one hundred and forty-two kilometers to the railroad mileage of the State, bringing the figures of the total system to six thousand two hundred and seventy-nine kilometers on December 31. Of this total four thousand three hundred and fifty-five kilometers belong to private enterprises; one thousand five hundred and sixty-nine to the State and the remaining three hundred and fifty-five to the Union.”

The most important of the lines belonging to the State referred to by Dr. Altino Arantes is the Sorocabana, with over eleven hundred kilometers of track, which is leased to the Brazil Railways: the other two state properties are the Funilense Railway and the Cantareira Tramway, running from S. Paulo city up a green, well-settled valley to picturesque waterworks among woods.

The Sorocabana with its general westerly direction is one of the lines which are pushing ahead towards the Matto Grosso boundary; building on from Salto Grande on the Paranápanema river, the line reached Caramarú in 1916. As we saw when on the subject of the line from Santos to S. Paulo, railroads in the State of São Paulo only began forming a network at the top of the plateau after the Serra had been conquered^[6]; the next to be constructed was the Paulista, which has its northern terminal at Barretos, in the heart of good cattle lands: a flourishing packing house owned by the Companhia Frigorifica e Pastoril of S. Paulo is situated near Barretos, and has as its president the same energetic Paulista who heads the railway, Conselheiro Antonio da Silva Prado. Both packing house and railway are purely Brazilian enterprises financed with Brazilian money, but the construction of the road was headed by an American named Hammond, and was in consequence known for a long time as “Hammond’s road” to distinguish it from “Fox’s road” as the pioneer line to Santos was called after the English engineer. The Paulista both served and created coffee plantations, following the lines of richest deposit of the red diabasic soils that have made S. Paulo the great coffee country of the world; the same may be said of the Mogyana, almost parallel to the Paulista but farther north, also a Brazilian owned and operated company, and the Northwestern.

Today these paralleled lines are linked with branches and possess steel arms reaching out into rich developing districts so that there is a genuine “rede ferroviario” over Paulista territory. The great coffee centre of Campinas is the point of departure for a star of lines, and so is the more northerly Riberão Preto, in the heart of the dark blood-red lands.

In a particularly fortunate position with regard to communication with other States as well as interior service, S. Paulo is linked directly to Rio by the line owned and operated by the Federal Government, the Central system, and onward from Rio due north to the port of Espirito Santo State; to the interior of Minas Geraes by way of Uberaba, Araguary and over the border into Goyaz to Catalão and Roncador; by following the Central’s lines the capital of Minas, the new town of Bello Horizonte, is reached; southward, the series of lines controlled by the Brazil Railways take the traveller from S. Paulo all through the States of Paraná, Santa Catharina and Rio Grande to the Republic of Uruguay, with connection at the border town of Santa Anna do Livramento with a line running south to Montevideo.

The writer followed this route in December, 1915. The journey took six days and nights, three of the latter being spent in the train and three at points en route while waiting for connections, certain trains running but twice a week. My path was smooth by official courtesy and the trip was pleasant as well as interesting; the sparsely occupied country, with colonies set down here and there near the track, has a delightful freshness born of bright empty spaces, woods and a multitude of shallow rapid streams.

The pine forests of Paraná and Santa Catharina with their flowery carpets were a series of fine pictures, while the wide-spread sunny pastures of southern Rio Grande, a perfect cattle country with a cool climate, are waiting for more white immigrants. Herds stray on the sides of gentle grassy slopes and in the valleys where a cluster of green marks the bed of a little river, fields are marked out and a red-tiled house nestles—but these are all too few.

The Brazil Railway Company was formed in 1906 through the initiative of Percival Farquhar with the object of unifying railway lines in South Brazil, then in several different hands as a result of the concessionary system which was the only way of inviting foreign capital in earlier days: the project also included the control of accessory ports and large industrial development along the line of the roads. About the same time the syndicate formed by Farquhar obtained interests in railways in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile; a huge unification plan was foreshadowed.

Some of these plans have fallen through—the narrow-gauge Argentine lines leased have, for instance, returned to their former control, and Chilean interests have been dropped—partly because disturbed conditions in Europe since the first Balkan war in 1912 ended opportunities for obtaining more metal props.

Registered in the United States, the Brazil Railway Company is really a monument to French confidence in Brazil, in that the capital employed, as well as the properties acquired, is Gallic in origin to a large extent. The capital of the company is fifteen hundred million francs, and of this huge sum nine hundred million francs were subscribed in Paris, the rest of the money coming from Brussels and London. The company is interested in thirty-eight subsidiary companies, including several railroads which were bought or leased (and, in the case of the Madeira-Mamoré, constructed), a frigorifico recently completed on Rio docks, a flourishing cattle company, a land and colonization company, lumber business, interest in ports, as at Pará, Rio Grande City and Rio de Janeiro (leased out to another company), a steamship service on the Amazon river, et cetera. Land owned by the cattle company totals to over eight million acres, in the States of Matto Grosso, S. Paulo, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul, and serious efforts are being made to improve the stock of the two or three hundred thousand head of cattle kept in various regions by the introduction of first-class breeding stock. Animals are sold to the second of S. Paulo’s packing-houses, the frigorifico at Osasco, just outside S. Paulo city, an American owned and operated enterprise^[7] dating also from 1914, which has friendly connection with the Brazil Railways.

A few of the interests of the Brazil Railways are in a prosperous state, as the lumber and cattle businesses, but the position of the company as a whole suffers from the weaker elements of the group, perhaps particularly the Amazonian, which were injected into the earlier South Brazilian plans; many of the development companies not only do not pay but need money to carry them along. The affairs of the company are now in the hands of an American receiver, and the latest report presented to long-suffering shareholders at a London meeting was optimistic in tone. It is the most ambitious group of enterprises under one control in Brazil, and perhaps this is one reason why its plan of line, land and port management has not been always looked upon with a favourable eye by Brazilian authorities. Objection seems also to be made to the introduction of foreign capital not for the purpose of development work of a new kind, but when employed in acquiring properties already existing.^[8]

In South Brazil the company operates over three thousand miles of line, including the State-owned Sorocabana, the São Paulo-Rio Grande, the Paraná line, the Auxiliaire traversing Rio Grande do Sul, and the little Thereza Christina in Santa Catharina.

São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are linked by the line owned by the Federal Government, the Central do Brasil, a series running off from a point on the S. Paulo line into the State of Minas Geraes; the writer followed this road when visiting Bello Horizonte, the new capital of Minas, a beautifully placed city with mountains rising behind it and terraced plains and valleys sweeping away in front. The line into Minas traverses a hilly country, green, fertile, well-watered with turbulent rivers whose valleys are sedulously followed. From near Bello Horizonte a long arm of steel reaches out past Sete Lagôas, Curvello and Curralinho, where a branch runs to the famous diamond fields of Diamantina, and to Pirapora on the river São Francisco: from this point steamboats meeting the trains take their goods and passengers down the waterway to Joazeiro in Bahia State. It Is from this river port of Pirapora that an extremely bold railway has been planned, to run almost due north to the city of Pará, the latter part of the route following the valley of the Tocantins river: the line would be some two thousand miles in length, traversing country never properly explored or charted. Authorization to contract for the work was given in 1911 to the brilliant Brazilian engineer, Frontin, to whose genius the beautifying of Rio de Janeiro is due, and a beginning was made between Pirapora and Formosa, but the universal lack of money has given a check to operations. The headquarters and main station of the Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil are situated in Rio de Janeiro. Three trains are run daily each way between Rio and São Paulo, those starting in the early morning landing passengers about six in the evening; they are equipped with a satisfactory and inexpensive restaurant service. The two night trains leave each city at intervals of an hour and a half every evening; the first leaves about seven o’clock, and is modestly furnished with beds on the North American Pullman plan, while the famous “luxo,” on which newspaper reporters always attend to take down the names of the illustrious, starts at nine o’clock; each camarote is a separate apartment with an individual toilette, fans, electric light, bells, and very prompt attendants always at hand, in the style of the best European trains. Leaving Rio the track runs through a pretty green valley, intersected with palm decked little ravines and numbers of round hills, until the uplands of São Paulo are approached. The line has never paid its way under Government control, although deficits have been recently much reduced by stern elimination of free passes for politicians and their friends. Expenses of operation were in 1915–16 abnormally inflated by the cost of coal which at one time reached one hundred and twelve milreis a ton (over twenty-eight dollars) and alterations were made in many of the locomotives to permit the use of oil as fuel. Coal used in Brazil is practically all imported, development of national southerly fields not being yet sufficient for a tithe of the needs, and while Welsh hard coal soared high when the British Government checked exports, North American was offered at prices little inferior on account of the making-hay methods of United States shipowners. Oil, too, is imported, but the Federal Government procured a large stock before changing the fuel methods of the Central, and is able to buy supplies from three different firms. Several railroads of Brazil, in these days of stress, burn wood.

From Rio de Janeiro city is an exceedingly important “rede” of lines, for in addition to the excellent system of the Central is the series belonging to the Leopoldina company, an admirable constructor, operator and developer company. The Leopoldina owns about one thousand eight hundred and fifty miles of track, serves an area of two hundred thousand square miles, and penetrates the three States of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Geraes and Espirito Santo, linking the port of Victoria to Rio by a lateral line with little branches joining up small ports by the way, and passing through the rich sugar country of Campos and the active town of Itapemirim (Cachoeiras) where several industries obtain power from the falls; other lines run off from Itapemirim, Campos, Macahé and several points penetrating fertile interior country with good transportation service. This coastwise series, and another running to Nova Friburgo and on in a general northerly direction, start from Nictheroy, across the bay from Rio city: the bay is traversed by a thoroughly up to date system of ferries, of the Cantareira Company, which originally belonged to a Brazilian firm but was purchased and is now operated by the Leopoldina.

The fine line to Petropolis starts from the Praia Formosa in Rio, the ascent taking two hours, apparently never grudged by the scores of business men whose homes are in the mountain city during the summer and who travel daily to Rio; from Petropolis it runs on into the Minas interior, serving a coffee and dairy country.

The Leopoldina Railway Company was formed in London in 1897, and with the capital subscribed existing lines were acquired which have since been improved and largely extended; the series was bankrupt when taken over but with unification of the lines and the encouragement of agriculture along the course there has been a respectable dividend-earning for the last ten years. The company maintains demonstration farms at Nova Friburgo and Bem Fica in the interior of Rio State, where irrigation is applied to the rich little valleys that intersect a multitude of hills; on the hilltops coffee has been grown for half a century, and while this process has been one of gradual but certain exhaustion the valleys have been neglected. It is interesting to see, all along the Leopoldina’s lines, efforts made by the Brazilian small farmer to imitate the methods of Bem Fica. Another demonstration farm at the station of Campos, on the way to Victoria, was changed in a few months from a piece of waste land to a lusty field of cotton as an example; all this coastal belt is an old sugar country which should also be a great producer of cotton and fibres and fruit. Running on to the capital and port of the State of Espirito Santo, Victoria, the line serves at the latter end a hilly coffee country with one of the most wonderful winding panoramas of scenery in South America; a dormitory and restaurant service of high-class type operates between Rio and Victoria, and from this exquisitely framed little port, “O Rio em miniatura,” go out four million bags of Brazil’s coffee crop. The city lies at the end of a bay entrance of great beauty, green, broken by fantastic hills reflected in pellucid water; port works of the best modern design have been begun by the Leopoldina engineers, but when the writer visited the port in late 1915 work had practically ceased as a result of financial stringency. The hopes of Victoria to become one of the busiest centres of activity are high, for in addition to her coffee export trade she may serve as a great doorway for outgoing minerals from Minas Geraes: enormous iron deposits for which Victoria is probably the most logical outlet have been acquired by a British company and with the war over, are awaiting loosened purse-strings, for development.

In addition to the coastwise link with Rio, the State of Espirito Santo is traversed in a north-westerly direction by a line which enters the valley of the Rio Doce and passes on into Minas Geraes; about four hundred and fifty kilometers are in traffic of this system, which, linking up with other lines in the south of Minas, will serve a fine region and add to the prestige of Victoria.

Looking up the coast from Victoria there is observable a gap between that pretty port and the cacao centre, Bahia, as regards railroad connections parallel to the sea coast. The greatest networks of lines have ceased in Espirito Santo, and above this region there is only one linking series of lines, the system of the Great Western of Brazil, serving the whole of the great north-east promontory of Brazil. The lines of Bahia do not form a coherent system, important as they are as regards local needs.

Below the port of Bahia (properly the city of São Salvador, but as little popularly known by that name as Rio is recognized by her official title of São Sebastião) there are two lines penetrating from coast towns inwards to cacao-producing country: the most ambitious runs from Ponta da Areia, close to the port of Caravellas, westwards across the narrow southern neck of Bahia State, into Minas Geraes to the town of Theophilo Ottoni, a distance of three hundred and seventy-six kilometers. The second penetrating line runs from the port of Ilhéos to Conquista, a distance of eighty-two kilometers. During the war and post-war booms this was a notable freight carrier and profit maker, for the cacao plantations tributary to the line have yielded unprecedentedly large crops at a time when every ounce of cocoa in the world has been called for at high prices. The isolated little Ilhéos rolled in unexpected money in 1915–16, and prospered again in 1919.

Bahia’s great port farther northward stands on a peninsula at the north of a large, deeply indented, island-studded bay. There is no river delta here to assist transportation problems, and connection between the lines originating at different parts of the bay is rendered difficult by the depth of sea inlets and the marshy character of the intervening land. It is for these reasons that a line runs south from Nazareth, itself south of the bay, west from São Felix, north-westerly from Cachoeira, with the most important line of all running from Bahia city across country until junction with the legendary river S. Francisco is effected at Joazeiro: this latter line branches off at Alagoinhas (“Little Lakes”) to Aracajú, the port of the little-known State of Sergipe, and forms the only linking railroad of the series serving Bahia. The cacao crop of the State is all marketed in and shipped from Bahia city: it reaches that distributing point from the producing centres of the more southerly lands by sea, a state-owned service of small steamboats, the “Navigação Bahiana,” helping in this transportation work, besides operating on the S. Francisco river and running to and from certain productive islands off the Bahia coast. In 1915 Bahia exported 41,546 tons of cacao with an official value of 37,000 contos of reis, or about nine and a quarter million dollars, yielding in taxes to the State 6,388 contos, in addition to large sums contributed by the tobacco and coffee export. As far as rail connection is concerned Bahia is practically out of touch with active regions of Brazil, but since her one city of first-class importance is situated on the sea margin, and she is very well served both by cabotagem and by ocean-going vessels, national and foreign, no complaint is heard in Bahia concerning the deficiency. The line from S. Felix, a town reached by boat across the bay from Bahia which has achieved fame for cigar manufacture, penetrates richly producing tobacco country: Nazareth is the headquarters of a district exporting manganese ores.