SOUTH AMERICA

Taranaki Daily News, 12 July 1929, Page 18

SOUTH AMERICA

PERNAMBUCO AND BAHIA INTERESTING CITIES. FAREWELL TO THE AMERICA. Pernambuco, a great sugar port, and Bahia, one of the most interesting cities of Brazil, are dealt with in this, the last of iO articles on South America written by Mr. W. J. Polson, M.P. for Stratfoid, who forecasts a brilliant future for this huge state in the New World. Somewhere in Atlantic, March 6, We said farewell to the Americans at Pernambuco, one of the great sugar ports of the south, situated on the heel of the Continent, if one may liken South America to a human foot. Pernambuco lies behind a great two-mile-long mole erected on a reef which protected the old anchorage in the days of the early navigators, and which was subsequently made use of by the Dutch to erect a mole and tower, a part of which can still be seen to-day. Nowadays, the Brazilians have continued that mole until ships of all classes have ample anchorage ground behind its torrid shelter. Pernambuco, a city of more than a quarter of a million people, cut by canals like a Dutch town, lies in the tropic heat along the shore behind the mole.

Like every other South American town, it is a city of contrasts —modern, welllighted and well laid out at one end, and a pickle of squalid negro cabins without any conveniences at all at the other. Il gives one a distinct shock to see Pernambuco. Most tourists don’t see it, they only see the modern end of it. Darkest Africa has nothing worse than its Negro end, and the guide books talk of Pernambuco as the Venice of South America. If you can imagine ten thousand people living in filthy reed;constructed cabins on a swampy mangrove marsh, which they have only made habitable by digging the low spots a little deeper in order to add six inches of height to the high spots so.that they may build their wretched insanitary huts upon them, and if you can conjure up a picture of thousands of half-clad and ignorant coloured folk crowded into these utterly unsanitary dwellings, at whose doorways the stagnant water laps at high tide and the ooze taints the air at low tide, you will have some faint idea of one section of the Venice of South America. They run double tracks of train-cars through this disgusting section, and the aristocracy of Pernambuco actually pass through it almost daily on their way out to the magnificent casino on the beach, where the usual South American pastime is catered for.

SUGAR AND COTTON MILLS.

Yet Pernambuco is a fine city with sugar and cotton mills, and a great back country extending away to the confines of the mysterious inland regions, where sugar or cotton, coffee or cocoa, or anything on earth can be grown with ease and certainty if one doesn’t mind the heat. But it needs a brown skin to stand it. Even the swarthy Portuguese in Pernambuco are browner than anywhere else. We were told it was due to the large number of African slaves formerly held in this part of South America and not freed until 1888; we were also told to watch out in Pernambuco. It is no place for the unsophisticated stranger to be wandering at large after dark. The State, like most other Brazilian States in this region, is only cultivated in patches. Further to the north it is more subject to droughts. Parahyba, Rio Grande do Norte, Ceara and Piauhy have a low rainfall along the coastal belt, and their richest land is in the interior, but lying as it does directly in the sweltering regioL just south of the Equator, only a coloured, or partially-coloured population can endure it for any length of time. The northern portion of Brazil, in spite of its fascination for the naturalist, its wonderful bird and animal life, the extraordinary fish in its rivers, and the glamour of Amazonia, presents no real attraction for any sane white man. A day or two ashore in some of these steaming towns is enough to convince most people of the fact.

AN INTERESTING CITY.

One of the most interesting cities in Brazil is Bahia, our last port of call but one, a town of over a quarter of a million population, and the old capital of Brazil, situated on a huge islandstudded harbour about a night’s steam south of Pernambuco. Bahia is celebrated as the city where there is a church for every day in the year, 365 all told. But I rise to contradict this awful calumny on the word of some of its best-known residents. When this statement appeared in a recent and wellknown book of travel, Bahia nearly had apoplexy. A committee of citizens went round and counted these churches, and there are only 125 of them. Just imagine putting another 240 churches on to a city already staggering along with 125! Bahia, looking out from a plateau above the pines, has some claim . to beauty. From its plaza and main driveway one can look out upon the harbour and the shipping, and see the Atlantic rolling in from the east. But Bahia’s chief °claim to fame is historical. The Bay has been the scene of many an encoiiter. Many an old Dutch and Portuguese navigator has dropped his anchor there, to say nothing of English corsairs who sacked the town, and went off to resume their usual occupations on the Spanish Main. The Dutch spoiled its appearance in 1636, and the Brazilians themselves did not improve matters with a revolution or two since then, but those incidents are soon forgotten in Bahia, and even the damage done in the last revolution in 1912, when most of the public buildings were riddled with can-non-siiot, has all been repaired.

A COCOA PORT.

Bahia is probably the largest cocoa port in the world, as Santos is the largest coffee port. The State of Bahia, in addition to a wonderful output of tobacco, cotton, coli'ee, rubber, sugar, nuts, etc., produces one-fifth of the world s supply of cocoa, which is all shipped out through' the port. These cocoa plantations, which are worked much on the lines of the coffee plantations of San Paolo, require a great deal of labour, and Bahia is consequently one of the places, competing with Santos for a share of immigration. The State is large, and its agricultural output consequently very considerable, but there is a great area of country in the interior where intensive cultivation, and indeed cultivation at any time, is not understood. But Bahia provides another illustration of

the wonderful possibilities of Brazil, and when one recalls the fact that there are twenty States, to say nothing of two important territories, that some of them are of enormous size and uniform ferility, and that the Brazilian is fully awake to their possibilities, one wonders what the future may hold for Brazil. In all the Americas through which we have wandered these months past there is no country with such wonderful potentialities. Even Argentina, with her great expanses of undeveloped prairie, sinks into a comparatively insignificant second place when compared to Brazil. The United States herself has no greater area, and. certainly no. more fertile soil, than Brazil, while much of her Western and mid-western territory, extending from Wyoming right down to Southern Arizona, is comparatively worthless. In any case, the United States has not the climate which enables Brazil to grow ten crops of alfalfa a year when she wants to grow alfalfa. The United States, with 120,000,000 of people, claims that she has room for 120,000.000 more. If so, what oppulation can Brazil ultimately carry in those future years when she will have cleared the forests and drained the marshes, and built the railways she needs.

A COMING COUNTRY.

Canada, like Brazil, has great areas extending to Greenland and the Arctic Circle, but the hand of Winter prevents Canada from every being a competitor in this race of the countries of the new world to become the homes of great populations. Assuredly, Brazil will win that race. She has all the advantages harbours, rivers, climate, soil and area. The Portuguese are a hardy people who have had to fight for their place in the sun in the Old World, and, as far as the stranger could judge, their South American descendants have lost none of the characteristics of their forefathers. Brazil is destined to play a great part some day in the history of the world —how great will depend upon herself.