Caminha concludes by saying that they had seen no gold, nor silver, nor any metal at all, but “the interior appears very large. Its waters are quite endless. So pleasing is it that if one cares to cultivate it, everything will grow.” Se plantando, dar. This phrase is now a familiar saying, but it has changed its meaning, from a promise to a reproach to someone who is neglecting obvious opportunities. Surely that simple reversal of meaning reveals a great deal about the long history of the undeveloped resources and possibilities of Brazil since the year 1500.
* * *
Cabral left behind two convicts, who were last seen bewailing their fate while the Indians tried to console them. The condemned men were supposed to learn the Indians’ language and to convert them to the True Faith. This was the usual Portuguese practice and no one knows how many hundreds of these wretched men were dropped along the coast. Most vanished forever, but here and there one survived and became a “great chief,” took many Indian wives and produced many children. The caboclo (half-Indian, half-Portuguese) daughters would be ready to marry the next generation of Portuguese adventurers that arrived, and in this way a solid foundation was laid for a mixed, and easily mixable, race. Early Brazilian history has several half-legendary convict-heroes. In fact, its personalities are an oddly assorted crew: condemned convicts, devout Jesuit missionaries (Loyola was just starting his great work), and Portuguese noblemen, usually younger sons, who became the capitães-mores, the “great captains.”
But no gold had been found; there were no cities to ransack such as the Spaniards had found on the western coasts of the continent, and for a quarter of a century more Brazil was left almost untouched.
* * *
Two things that everyone knows about Brazil are that it is the same size as the United States (now that Alaska is a state), and that the seasons there are the reverse of ours. It is big, stretching from north of the Equator to south of the Tropic of Capricorn, and west to the foothills of the Andes, an area of 3.3 million square miles. And while it is perfectly true that livestock (including dogs and cats) imported from northern countries have a hard time of it the first few years, and swelters through the Brazilian summers (January through March) in “winter” coats, — to say that the seasons are reversed is too strong. The Equator is not that much like the bottom frame of a mirror. Caminha thought the climate “equable,” and although he really didn’t know, he was more or less right.
Brazil is tropical and sub-tropical, with few extremes of temperature. The Amazon is roughly parallel to the Equator, yet, surpringly, the average temperature at Santarém, a third of the way up the river, is only seventy-eight degrees. In the cooler south, frosts occur only rarely as far north as São Paulo. If one can generalize at all about such a vast country, the average North American would be apt to say it is all just a little too hot. Never as hot as New York City in a prolonged heat wave, or as cold as a winter in Washington, D.C. — altogether a bit lacking in variety. On the other hand, the rainfall varies entirely too much, — over eighty inches a year in the Amazon basin, and in the northeast in some places it can scarcely be measured in inches at all. The State of Ceará is so dry and the sunshine so monotonous that when the sky is overcast the Cearenses greet each other hopefully with “What a beautiful day!”
The warm climate is still blamed by many historians, including Toynbee, and by the Brazilians themselves fairly continuously, for the country’s lack of development and almost everything else wrong with it. It is held responsible for the “laziness” they regard as the greatest national defect (although on occasion it can be considered as a virtue, too). According to the usual theory, man needs alternating seasons and the stimulation of cold weather to keep him energetic and “progressing” properly. But this may not be true at all. “Laziness” may well be due more to bad health, poor food, and boredom, than to climate. Man is the most adaptable of animals. As we learn more about tropical diseases, nutrition, and psychology, and if the lot of the poor Brazilian is ever improved so that he is healthier and has more to work for in life, the old-fashioned, moralistic idea of “laziness” may disappear for good — and the Brazilians have one less item burdening their consciences.
Most of the […] square miles are a vast, rolling plateau, with only one wave of mountain ranges that runs north and south, fairly close to the coast. The mountains are nowhere over 10,000 feet high, the highest near Rio de Janeiro. In the north they flatten out towards the Amazon, leaving more of the coastal plain for sugar-raising; in the south they flatten out into the Uruguay and Plata rivers, leaving plains for cattle-raising. But for most of the coast the line of mountains between the coastal plains and the higher, cooler interior has been the greatest of all hindrancess to the growth of Brazil. It forms a natural barrier that for four hundred years has kept all the cities and most of the population, as if encamped before a fortress, along the eastern edge of the country.
There is another big geographical handicap. There are great and navigable rivers, but they have never served to open up the country or help its economy to any great extent. Brazilians speak enviously of the Mississippi; if only they’d had a Mississippi things would be very different. It is probably true. Large freighters can go 2,300 miles up the Amazon, a river that makes the Mississippi look almost narrow, but that leads to no important cities or industrial centers. The second-largest river, the São Francisco, flows north, almost through the middle of the country. It, too, is navigable, but before it reaches the sea it is interrupted by the Falls of Paulo Affonso, and like the Amazon, it reaches no important cities, and serves for even less trade. Railroads have been built very slowly and for short stretches, serving one or two cities only. For centuries trade and communications were carried on entirely by coastal shipping, or mule trains over incredibly bad roads or trails. The air age is changing this state of affairs, and at the same time, or slightly later, trunk roads are at last beginning to connect the cities and towns from north to south, and from east to what few settlements there are in the west.
* * *
Brazil is still more than half-covered with forests. It contains, at a rough guess, more than fifty thousand vegetable species, and no one knows how many of these are potentially valuable to man. As well as all the fruits, native and early imported (like the banana), there are trees yielding: rubber, cacão, Brazil nuts, balsams, resins, fibres, cellulose, and tannin; and from the palm-trees alone, oils and waxes, as well as dates, coconuts, and palmito. There are many valuable and beautiful woods: teak, mahoganies, Jacarandas, satin-woods, and cedar — some woods so hard they can only be cut with special machinery.
As far as mineral resources go, the surface has barely been scratched. There is not much coal, and what there is is of poor quality — a fact that held back the railroads, and until recently, the growth of iron and steel industries. But — to quote from the staggering lists given in The New World Guides—there are: bauxite, bismuth, barium, asbestos, chromite, copper, gold, iron (15 million tons, approximately 25 per cent of the world supply), also “graphite, gypsum, kaolin, lead, limestone, manganese, marble, nickle, diamonds, zinc, radium, euxenite, mica, rock crystals, and tungsten.”
There is a national oil industry, Petrobras, getting under way, and the source of great dissension. But expert geologists, Brazilian and foreign, believe that there are probably no very large deposits of petroleum in Brazil.