The West India Company was able to induce an admirable Governor to take charge of the new possession, Prince John Maurice of Nassau; he reached Recife in 1637, and inaugurated a conciliatory policy towards such Pernambucanos as would accept Dutch rule: those who would not were pursued into the interior forests where they retreated under one of the Albuquerques, and were forced to flee from Alagôas into Bahia. When such resisters were caught they were shipped to Dutch settlements in the East Indies.

Religious freedom was promulgated by the Protestant rulers, more systematic administration of settlements and estates inaugurated, better sugar milling methods introduced as well as farming implements, and the scientific exploration of the interior was made. Prince Maurice brought with him map-makers, geologists, botanists and expert mineralogists, and sent them to the valleys and hills of the Bahian hinterlands. Elias Herkmann took an expedition of one hundred men from Recife in 1641, to make scientific investigations, and although he did not find mines of importance he studied native relics and language, subsequently publishing a book on the Tapuyo race.

George Marcgraf and Wilhelm Piso are also Dutch names of note in connection with Brazil; the former studied Brazilian topography and water systems and wrote a treatise on the subject as well as the Historia Rerum Naturalium Brazilium; the latter was the first classifier of Brazilian flora and fauna. “We owe to him,” says Dr. Egas Moniz of Bahia, “the discovery of the emetic-cathartic properties of ipecacuanha and copaiba” as well as the therapeutic virtues of jaborandi and red mangue and several other drugs obtained from the Brazilian matto. The first scientific charting of the sertão behind Pernambuco, Alagôas and north Bahia was done during this time; herds of cattle already wandered over interior pastures, and settlers led by the independent spirit which renders the Brazilian indifferent to solitude had formed fazendas along river borders; explorers had wandered by these water paths looking for mines, but systematic maps and charts were lacking.

In 1640 Portugal revolted from Spain, regained her independence, and offered the crown to a member of the House of Braganza, a line which retained its inheritance until a few years ago. The effect upon the Americas was again notable; the Pernambucanos, still carrying on guerilla warfare from the forests, were heartened, obtained help from an enthusiastic Bahia, and redoubled their efforts; the Dutch came to an agreement with Portugal that all possessions conquered by them during the Spanish régime should be held, and tried to extend their holdings farther north—an effort which was vain in itself, costly in life and money, and hardened the determination of the colonists to do for themselves what the mother country would not do on their behalf. In 1643 Prince Maurice returned to Holland: he had the interests of the colony as such at heart too much to please the West India Company. A liberal minded man, he wished to see the colonial ports opened to free commerce, succeeded in getting the Company to forego all monopolies except that of taking dyewoods away from Brazil and sending in slaves and munitions of war, any Dutch captain being free to visit ports controlled by his compatriots; these were not agreeable pills for a monopolistic organization to swallow. On the other hand in recalling Maurice of Nassau the Company lost prestige, henceforward carried on a losing struggle with the virile Brazilians, and were forced out of section after section until by 1648 only the forts of Parahyba, Rio Grande do Norte, the island of Itamaracá and the city of Recife were in Dutch hands. A certain embarrassment was created in Europe by this situation, and the Portuguese Government, taken to task by Holland, sent emissaries to the insurgent Pernambucanos to order suspension of hostilities: the leaders replied that they “would go to receive punishment for their disobedience after they had turned the invaders out of Pernambuco,” and went on with the war. Holland herself, now at loggerheads with England or rather with Cromwell on account of her support given to the Stuarts, could not help her Brazilian colony; a severe defeat was inflicted by the Pernambucans in 1649, at the battle of Guararapes, and the Dutch, never recovering from this blow, were finally obliged to capitulate to Francisco Barretto in January, 1654. The Pernambucan attackers were nerved to this final effort, the storming of Recife, by the news of the disaster inflicted on van Tromp’s fleet in the English Channel at the hands of Blake.

Three months later the Dutch commander with all his troops left Brazil, and the only fragments remaining to the States General after a tremendous outlay of money and blood were a few islands in the West Indies and a piece of the Guiana country: small return for great effort. Portugal paid eight million florins to the Dutch in settlement of Brazilian differences and agreed to allow Holland free trade with the American colonies in all articles except the precious brazil-wood.

The chief results of Dutch occupation of the four capitanias of the north-eastern promontory for twenty-four years were, first, stimulation of world interest in this part of the vast Americas, for the sea-captains who carried Brazilian products for the first time into other parts of Europe than Portugal acted as advance agents of Brazilian commerce: second, scientific investigation into natural products and demonstration of the value of drugs peculiar to this part of South America: third, introduction of better town management systems: fourth, creation of a healthy national spirit in the northern provinces, with lasting effect upon character: and the quickening of colonization in the extreme north. It was not until the Dutch and French settled in Ceará and Maranhão and on the Amazon that serious efforts were made to develop these tropical territories under the equator; the year 1620 witnessed the first arrival of settlers of Portuguese nationality in Maranhão when two hundred families came from the Azores.

Another interesting and direct result of the Dutch intervention was the creation of the Companhia do Commercio do Brasil (Commercial Company of Brazil) by the Governor General, intended as a set-off to the Dutch West India Company. It was established in 1650, received monopolies and concessions of a valuable character, and in return was obliged to provide a powerful armed fleet to convoy merchant vessels through enemy-infested seas. The Commercial Company did as a fact render great services to the Brazilians fighting against the Dutch, blockading northern ports while insurgent armies attacked by land.

While the north was struggling with the Dutch and French and incidentally becoming solidified by the tussle until a genuine national feeling came into existence, Bahia, beating off attacks and remaining the administrative residence of a Captain-General, was the centre of the wealthiest part of the colony; all the slaves brought from Africa were sold here, and although they were partly distributed, this was the chief slave-owning region and is still the place where more pure negroes are to be seen than anywhere else in Brazil. Farther south Espirito Santo, one of the oldest of Brazilian colonies, was growing cane and raising cattle, but suffered from raiding foreigners, as also did Ilhéos; Rio de Janeiro became the seat of a second Captaincy-General in 1608, for a time, with command over S. Vicente and Espirito Santo but had no importance until the discovery of mines made her the chief gateway to the golden regions. Out of the path of the Dutch, whose object was wide agricultural lands, Rio neither suffered nor gained as did the North; at this part of the Brazilian coast the mountain barrier comes right down to the sea’s edge, the granite wall shouldering into the waters of the deeply indented bay: there is very little land suitable for plantations except in narrow valleys until the Serra do Mar is climbed. It was this lack of sugar land that kept Rio uncolonized, lovely as she is, for half a century after the colonies on either side of her were started; settlement by the Portuguese might have been put off still longer if the French under Admiral Villegaignon had not taken possession of the bay in 1555, made friends with the Tamoyo Indians as the Portuguese were never able to do, fortified a rocky island, and established a Huguenot colony here—the ill-fated “France Antarctique.” The energetic Mem de Sá, Captain-General after Thomé de Souza, brought a fleet from Bahia, drove the French into hiding on the mainland, sent his nephew, Estacio de Sá, to Portugal to get help, and this gallant young man returned with a strong force in 1565. In two years’ time, with troops from Bahia and São Paulo assisting, the unfortunate Huguenots were utterly defeated, the remnants of the exiles retiring into the woods with their Indian allies and disappearing from history. The body of Estacio de Sá, killed in the last decisive fighting, was buried in the shade of the Pão d’Assucar near the first Portuguese town founded in the bay and named São Sebastião. Another member of the same family, Correia de Sá, was sent to head the new Portuguese settlement, and eventually died there at the age of 113.

Division of Brazil into two captaincies-general in 1608, to be united again soon afterwards and again subsequently divided, was part of the experiments made by the European home governments, apparently with the sincere wish to develop the country; it was supposed that a region so vast could not be governed by one man, but as a matter of fact the occupied territory was along the seaboard on the whole, and communication by sea was fairly speedy; from 1549 onwards, when the first Captain-General was appointed, the mother country bought up when convenient the strips of land belonging to the heirs of the donatarios; some new captaincies were also added from time to time, as that of Grão Pará in 1616, Minas Geraes, Matto Grosso and Goyaz after the discovery of gold and diamonds, and an independent State of Maranhão, governed separately from the rest of Brazil was also created in 1621, thus adding to the governmental confusion in spite of good intentions. Decentralization was increased by the lack of commercial exchange between the different regions, and no successful effort improved this fault until the notable Marquis de Pombal took matters in hand in a statesmanlike manner in the latter half of the eighteenth century, buying the capitanias which were yet in private hands, creating Brazil a viceroyalty and Rio the viceregal capital.

But before that date much water had flowed under Brazilian bridges. It is not the purpose of this book to give in detail the history of Brazil, but to show the chief events and their effect upon development. Following the creation of the capitania system and its series of coastal settlements came the penetration of the southern interior by the Jesuits in their “reductions,” and the scattering of these centres of Indian population at the hands of the bandeirantes; the next happening of extreme importance for Brazil was the seizure of different parts of the coast by the Dutch and French, with their stimulating effect upon Portuguese colonization; it was after this that the gold rush to the interior of Minas, Goyaz and Matto Grosso populated and opened up the sertão in tiny patches, but at the same time half denuded the coast of its settlers and injured the agricultural production of the country, the prosperity of which was almost entirely owing to the introduction of negro slaves, another great factor in Brazilian progress.

Today the mining industry of Brazil accounts for a very small item on her exports lists, chiefly because the diamonds which go out are mostly contraband, the gold is produced by only two principal mines, and while there is a promising export of manganese it is insignificant compared to the big business of the country or to the possibilities contained in Brazil’s mineral seamed mountains. In the early eighteenth century Brazil was a famous gold country, and it is reckoned that over five hundred million dollars’ worth of this metal has been taken out. Nearly all this gold was found in placers easily washed out by hand in the crudest manner; when the rich alluvial deposits along river valleys were exhausted Brazil ceased to be a gold producer on a spectacular scale. In Minas Geraes rich sands were found near the present Ouro Preto, the first mining city that was founded bearing the name of Villa Rica; all about it the whole country is still in heaps, turned over by the miners who came a couple of hundred years ago. In that day people flocked into Minas, coming by road from S. Paulo, by the S. Francisco river from Bahia, and by a shorter cut over the mountain passes from Rio. The bones of many folk remained by the way: it is said that of one band of 300 Paulistas setting out in 1725 only five persons, two white men and three negroes, reached their objective, the far interior mines of Cuyabá. It became necessary for the authorities to forbid the taking of negroes to the mines, so general was the abandonment of plantations, but the protest of the Crown was only half-hearted; it was eminently satisfactory that a stream of gold and diamonds should flow across the Atlantic to Lisbon, and it was of as little use for governors to point out the bad economy of coastal depopulation in the seventeen hundreds as it had been for Governor Diogo de Menezes to write to the King in 1608: “Your Majesty may believe me that the true mines of Brazil are sugar and brazil-wood, whence your Majesty draws so much advantage without costing the Royal Treasury a single penny.”

Quarrels at the mines led to the “Guerra dos Emboabas,” a factional disturbance between the Paulista discoverers and stranger gold-diggers; in the end the Paulistas were driven back, retired to their own uplands, and Minas Geraes was politically separated. Indomitably energetic, the men of S. Paulo turned their attention southward, where the Spaniards had entered and settled, drove the intruders out of Rio Grande do Sul and thus secured another, and one of the finest, regions for Brazil.

In 1750 King John V of Portugal died. The death of Portuguese monarchs did not as a rule make more than a perfunctory difference to the Colonies, but in this case the succession of José I was important because, with infinite faith in his brilliant Minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello, afterwards Marquis de Pombal, he left the chief affairs of the kingdom to these able hands. Pombal has been bitterly attacked: he was without doubt a man of iron; but he was a man of unusual foresight and intelligence who thoroughly realized the great value of Brazil, and did much to improve economic conditions in that huge possession. He seems to have had what Brazilians call a palpite concerning the destiny of Brazil and Portugal.

Almost the first act of this statesman was the curtailing of the powers of the Inquisition: he abolished autos da fé, which must have given relief to Brazil if the historian Porto Seguro is correct in saying that no less than 500 Brazilians had been burnt alive in Lisbon by the Holy Office. With a special eye to Portuguese America he reduced taxes on tobacco and sugar, had the diamond traffic strictly supervised, created commercial companies to trade with Pará, Maranhão, Pernambuco and Parahyba; specially encouraged the plantation of rice and cotton in the North; legislated most of the commerce which was in the hands of the enterprising English into Portuguese channels; inaugurated good ship-building yards in Brazilian ports; settled boundary disputes with the Spanish on Brazilian borders; brought all capitanias still in private control under the Portuguese Crown—Cametá, Caeté, Ilha de Joannes, Itamaracá, Reconcavo de Bahia, Ilhéos, Porto Seguro, São Vicente and Campos dos Goytacazes; and as his most powerful and bitterly assailed effort he laid hands on the Jesuits. The Society, overwhelmed in the South, was strongly entrenched in the North since the opening of Pará and Maranhão; they had done wonderful and self-sacrificing work there; but they hostilized the colonists and made the mistake of arming their protégés the Indians against the settlers. They constituted themselves in Brazil as Bartolomé de las Casas did in Mexico and Guatemala, the Defenders of the Indians; they were extraordinarily successful with them, and it is not impossible that if some working arrangement could have been found between the colonists and Jesuits a great problem might have been solved—that of obtaining some control over the natives and teaching them industries without undermining their peculiar physical constitution. With the best intentions in the world, more modern efforts made to hold the Indian tribes in civic life have ended in their speedy dwindling and extinction; no one except Colonel Rondon seems able to teach the Indian and keep him alive.

To break up the Jesuit missions, Pombal in 1755 decreed the “emancipation of the Indians of Pará and Maranhão,” a curious corollary to the laws that the Society had themselves obtained earlier forbidding the Portuguese settlers to enslave Indians. A little later occurred in Portugal an attempt against the life of the King: the Jesuits were, quite unjustly, accused of being concerned in it, and on this pretext they were ordered expelled in a body from Portugal and from all Portuguese possessions. This was in 1759, expulsion from Brazil taking place during 1760; not content with this, the abolition of the Society of Jesus was obtained from Pope Clement XIV in 1773. This severe measure was rescinded in 1814, and the Jesuits came back to Brazil as to other world dominions, doing excellent educational work at the present time; their colleges are magnificent institutions, and it is commonly said in Brazil that the very best education for men is obtained in the Jesuit college at Itú, in the interior of São Paulo State.

José I died in 1777, and Pombal promptly descended from power; but his work in the stimulation of Brazilian industries, the creation of a genuine Brazilian entity through strong centralization, and the erection of Rio into a viceroyalty, paved the way for the next great change.

Early in the nineteenth century, when the North American colonies of Great Britain had successfully revolted, and the French Revolution was an accomplished fact, ideas of republican independence began to agitate many heads in South America. Brazil had only one uprising, the famous Conspiracy of Minas, which got no farther than plans; it was headed by one of the influential Freire de Andrade family, and all the plotters were eventually pardoned except one scapegoat, who was executed publicly in Rio in 1792, and thus achieved immortality: his nickname of Tiradentes is preserved in the name of a square in Rio and a public holiday on the anniversary of his death.

A few years later Napoleon was overrunning Europe. Portugal, friendly to his enemy England, incurred the Napoleonic wrath, tried to make terms too late, and was being actually invaded by the French when an English naval squadron appeared in the Tagus commanded by Sir Sidney Smith; the Portuguese royal family and a host of courtiers went aboard Portuguese vessels and were convoyed across the Atlantic, out of Napoleon’s reach, to Brazil. It would not at all have suited England for the Braganzas to fall into hands which already held too many royal prisoners. It was one of the most remarkable transferences of a crown in history, this emigration of Dom João to his American colonies; it was a useful and a dignified refuge for him and at the same time was of great value to Brazil, probably saving her from years of disorder and bloodshed.

The royal party arrived first at Bahia, where the town turned out in enthusiastic welcome and invited Dom João to make this city his seat of government; but his destination was Rio, and he sailed on, first giving out a proclamation which ensured him a good reception in the Capital—the Abertura dos Portos, or opening of the ports of Brazil freely to the ships of all the world “friendly to Portugal.” Public printing presses were now permitted, a newspaper was started, chiefly engaged in training the minds of the nascidos no Brasil (Brazilian born) to appreciation of the monarchical presence, but still the commencement of Brazilian journalism; foreign capital began to come, and active Europeans, attracted by the advertisement that the transference of the monarchy gave Brazil, entered and established businesses; the Banco do Brasil was inaugurated; fine buildings were erected in Rio; the Regent’s collection of pictures and books, brought with him, formed the nucleus of the excellent museum and library of modern Rio; the harbour was improved, a School of Art and Naval College founded. By the time that Portugal was free from the Napoleonic shadow, and, in 1821, called Dom João home again, he left behind a Brazil to which a tremendous impetus had been given, and which had been raised to the dignity of a kingdom equal in importance with Portugal and Algarves six years earlier. North and south of Brazil the newly freed Spanish American countries were deep in troubles born of a sudden injection into independence of unaccustomed populations. Brazil herself could scarcely have avoided being drawn into the vortex had her citizens still to complain of the narrow policies and repressive measures of the colonial system; they had become too proud and too strong for development to be longer retarded, and the European turn of fortune came in the nick of time. It was lucky that Dom João was a man of shrewd good sense. Dom Pedro, son of Dom João, remained in Brazil as Regent, and the country was still linked to Portugal; it was soon apparent that this condition could not endure. The jealous legislature in Lisbon wished to reduce Brazil again to the level of a colony under tutelage, despite the efforts of Dom João; the news came to Rio together with a peremptory order for the return of the prince, and he, a good diplomat, elected to throw his lot in with Brazil, and declared the Independence on the historic hillside of Ypiranga, in 1822.^[4]

Proclaimed Emperor soon afterwards, Pedro ruled for nine years and then abdicated in favour of his five-year-old child, Dom Pedro segundo. To this rather stormy period of control is due the commencement of deliberate colonization of Europeans into Brazil; it was a policy widely continued later on by Pedro II, and afterwards adopted both by the Federal Government and by separate States of the Union. A regency lasted until Pedro was fourteen years old, the most remarkable hand on the reins of power meanwhile being that of the astute priest, Father Diogo Feijó.

Pedro II endeared himself to Brazil by his kindly and tactful spirit, his genial broadmindedness; he was a scholar by instinct, and did his best to advance Brazil by the encouragement of railroad building, invitation to foreign capital, and the throwing open of wide spaces of southern land to good class immigrants. It was during his reign that the English, who had established themselves firmly during the first monarchical periods, sending ships regularly and opening markets for Brazilian products, were followed by the commercial French and later by the German merchant. The industrial and educational advance of Brazil is largely owing to the personal initiative of Dom Pedro II. His reign was one of the longest in history, from 1831 to 1889, and the development within this period includes inauguration of city tramways as well as railroads; the discovery that coffee would grow in Brazil and its systematic cultivation; discovery of the properties of rubber; the introduction of factories; use of hydraulic power.

Following the world agitation against slavery, Brazil in 1854 forbade the introduction of negroes; there were however still large numbers of these people in bondage as well as a much larger number free.

Public feeling was much excited about the question in the eighties, and at last in 1888, when Dom Pedro during a period of illness had made his daughter, the Princess Isabel, Regent, the powerful influence of many highminded Brazilians was brought to bear, and the decree of abolition was signed.

Slave holders were not so pleased as statesmen, when their farm workers immediately forsook the field and flocked into the cities; agriculture undoubtedly suffered, and to the discontent of the planters is credited the agitation that now gathered head against the continuation of the monarchical system. The truth seems rather to be that the Empire had outlived its usefulness, and surrounded by republics could not survive. There was also a general fear lest Isabel, said to be priest-dominated, should be permanently appointed Regent, and this idea hastened the day that would otherwise have been postponed, in all probability, until the death of the good and highly revered Dom Pedro. A growing band of republicans, some of the foremost men in Brazilian affairs today, found themselves strong enough to proclaim the end of the Empire; Dom Pedro was informed and asked to leave the country within twenty-four hours, and did so; the Republic in Brazil dates from November 15, 1889.

The first years of the new régime were darkened by disorders, the worst being the revolt, long-drawn-out, in Rio Grande do Sul. Two military presidents were succeeded by four civilians, and these in turn by a third militarist, and notably extravagant, presidency from 1910 to 1914. The present President, a lawyer, Dr. Wencesláo Braz Pereira Gomez, is making heroic efforts to redeem the financial condition of the country, and is fortunate in being aided by a group of exceedingly able men. The country became deeply involved during the last twenty-five years; if she were an old land the burden would be severe: her strength lies in her youth, internal vigour, and unsurpassed abundance of untapped resources.

The tremendous money spending of Republican times has been sharply censured since the outbreak of war in Europe suddenly pulled up the country to a realization of her debts; it is probably fortunate that she was just too late to arrange yet another, for which negotiations were opened in 1914. But while it is true that literally tons of money were borrowed and spent after 1889, it is also from that date that the great leap forward of the country is reckoned; her extravagance was a wide advertisement—the attention of the world was called to this spoilt child of the nations as no modest jogging along the beaten track would have done. Bankers, commercial firms, writers, settlers came to Brazil; there was a feverish expansion in railroad building, and from this period dates the inauguration of good modern port works in Rio, Bahia, Pará, Pernambuco, Santos, Victoria, and many other points of call for ocean-going vessels; waterworks and town drainage, the better paving of a score of cities, extinction of yellow fever and other tropical pests, were all accomplished with money borrowed in the hey-day of Brazil.

The check in facile borrowing of very large sums on easy terms has undoubtedly acted as a cold shower upon South America in general, somewhat accustomed to financial sunshine; the result has been salutary in awakening the people all over the continent to the need for unprecedented personal effort. It has, too, brought about a new sense of North American relations, created and needed, with South America. The European War has turned the United States from the position of a debtor to that of a creditor country, and while up to the end of 1922 her loans to the whole of South America have not exceeded two hundred million dollars, chiefly short-time State borrowings, caution is mutually beneficial. There is, however, much work to be done which calls urgently for gold supplies, and it is but logical that the country accumulating money rapidly should be willing to take up a due share of the development work waiting; European interests need not and should not be ousted, but can be readily and happily supplemented.

The United States of Brazil today contain over 24,000,000 people, still largely concentrated upon the sea coast, in a score of thriving cities. She is at peace with her neighbours, with no shadow upon her political horizon; her only great problem is the industrial, financial one, and this, with the concentrated effort of Brazilians and the right kind of external help, can be solved. The entry of Brazil into the War upon the side of the Allies, after the torpedoing of the Brazilian vessels and the declaration of war by the United States against Germany, brought about a new international comradeship, and has awakened the world to a better understanding of the spirit and power of the country.