South America Observations and Impressions

Other cities there are where mountains rising around form a noble background and refresh the heart of such town dwellers as have learnt to love them. "I will lift mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my aid." Such cities are Athens and Smyrna, Genoa and Palermo, San Francisco and Santiago de Chile. But in Rio the mountains seem to be almost a part of the city, for it clings and laps round their spurs just as the sea below laps round the capes that project into the bay. Nor does one see elsewhere such weird forms rising directly from the yards and gardens of the houses. One can hardly take one's eyes off the two strangest among these, which are also the most prominent in every prospect. The Pan de Azucar (Sugar Loaf) is a cone of bare granite, so steep as to be scaleable at one point only by the boldest climbers, which stands on the ridge between the bay and the ocean. The other peak is the still loftier Corcovado, a vertical shaft of rock something like the Aiguille de Dru,91 which springs right out of the houses to a height of over two thousand three hundred feet. Such strange mountain forms give to the landscape of the city a sort of bizarre air. They are things to dream of, not to tell. They remind one of those bits of fantastic rock scenery which Leonardo da Vinci loved to put in as backgrounds, though the rocks of Rio are far higher, and are also harder. A painter might think the landscapes altogether too startling for treatment, and few painters could handle so vast a canvas as would be needed to give the impression which a general view makes. Yet the grotesqueness of the shapes is lost in the splendour of the whole, – a flood of sunshine, a strand of dazzling white, a sea of turquoise blue, a feathery forest ready to fall from its cliff upon the city in a cascade of living green.

It is hard for man to make any city worthy of such surroundings as Nature has given to Rio. Except for two or three old-fashioned streets in the business quarter near the port and arsenal, it is all modern, and such picturesqueness as there is belongs to the varying lines of shore and hill, and to the interspersed gardens. A handsome modern thoroughfare, the Avenida Central, has been run through what used to be a crowded mass of mean houses, and it has the gay effectiveness of a Parisian boulevard. Villas surrounded by trees crown the hills that rise here and there; and one street is lined by two magnificent rows of Royal palms, their stems straight and smooth as marble pillars, crested by plumes of foliage. At the east end of the city the semicircular bay of Botafogo is surrounded by a superb palm-planted esplanade, whose parapet commands the finest general view over the entrance to the bay and the heights behind Nictheroy, and as far as the Organ Mountains which rise in a row of lofty pinnacles thirty miles away.

In such a city, the curious traveller does not need to hunt for sixteenth-century churches or quaint old colonial houses. Enough for him that the settings of the buildings are so striking. The strong light and the deep shadows, and the varied colours of the walls and roofs of the houses, the scarlet flowers climbing over the walls, and the great glossy dark green leaves of the trees that fill the gardens, with incomparable backgrounds of rock and sea, – all these are enough to make the streets delightful.

Not less delightful are the environs. The Botanic Garden about a mile away has long been famous for its wonderful avenue of royal palms, each one hundred feet high, all grown from the seed of one planted a hundred years ago, in the days when the king of Portugal held his court here. But it has other things to shew, equally beautiful and more interesting to the botanist. Not even the garden of Calcutta contains a more remarkable collection of tropical trees, and its vistas of foliage and bowery hollows overarched by tall bamboos are enchanting. As respects situation, there is, of course, no comparison; for at Calcutta, as at our own Kew, all is flat, while here the precipices of the Corcovado on the one side, and the still grander crags of the Tijuca and Gavea on the other, shoot up thousands of feet into the blue.

A longer excursion to the south of the city carries one in the course of a five hours' drive through a succession of mountain landscapes unsurpassed even in Brazil. A road winds up the hillside through leafy glens, where climbing plants and tree-ferns fill the space between the trunks of the great trees. Now and then it comes out on the top of a ridge, and one looks down into the abysmal depths of forest, bathed in vaporous sunlight. Through a labyrinth of valleys one reaches a clearing in the forest, above which is seen the beautiful peak of Tijuca, and beyond it, still higher, the amazing Gavea, a square-sided, flat-topped tower of granite. In their boldness of line these peaks remind one of those that stand up round the Mer de Glace at Chamouni. There moraines and masses of fallen stones are heaped upon the bases of these Aiguilles, and nothing breaks the savage bareness of their sides except snow beds in the couloirs. Here the peaks rise out of a billowy sea of verdure. The steepness of their faces seems to defy the climber; yet on their faces there are crevices just big enough for shrubs to root in, by the help of which a daring man might pull himself aloft. Nature, having first hewn out these peaks into appalling precipices, then set herself to deck them with climbing plants and to find foothold for trees on narrow ledges and to cover the surface with the bright hues of mosses and lichens, and fill chinks and crannies with ferns and pendulous flowers that wave and sway in the passing breeze. Some way further, from the top of a gap between the peaks, the open ocean is suddenly seen a thousand feet below, its intense blue framed between green hills, with long billows rushing up over the white sands of the bay, and lines of spray sparkling round the rocky isles that rise beyond, like the summits of submerged mountains.

Though the bay of Rio was discovered as far back as 1531 by the Portuguese sailor who took its mouth for a river, and was settled not long after, first by Frenchmen in 1558 and then by Portuguese in 1567, the settlement grew slowly, and it was not till 1762 that the seat of government was transferred here from Bahia, seven hundred miles further to the north. Now the population, estimated at a million, is in South America exceeded by that of Buenos Aires only, and in recent years much has been done to improve both the city and its port and wharves. Still greater service has been rendered by sanitary measures which have not only cleared away slums, but have practically extinguished yellow fever, and reduced the mortality from other tropical diseases. Rio is now a pleasant place of residence in winter, and the sea-breeze makes the climate agreeable in all but the hottest months, during which Europeans find it debilitating. Fifty years ago the then Emperor Dom Pedro the Second built himself a summer residence among the mountains which rise beyond the further end of the bay, and this presently became the "hot weather station," as people say in India, for the richer class of citizens and for the representatives of foreign countries. Now that Rio itself is more healthy, the need for an annual migration is less imperative, but the natural charm as well as the much cooler air of Petropolis – so the place is called – have maintained it as a summer resort. It is an excellent centre both for the naturalist and for the lover of scenic beauty.

The railway from Rio, after traversing the low and marshy ground along the margin of the bay for more than twenty miles, reaches the foot of the Organ Mountains, which form a part of the Coast Range already referred to.92 These Organ Mountains (Serra dos Orgãos) rising in a row of granite towers to a height of 7300 feet, the ravines between their peaks filled with luxuriant forest, make a noble ending to the view from Rio along the length of the bay. A botanist could spend no more delightful week than in rambling among them at a season when the rains are not too heavy. The railway climbs the Serra at its lowest point, about 2600 feet above sea-level, descending a little on the other or northeastern side to Petropolis. The grade is so steep as to require trains to be hauled up by a wire rope. Nothing can surpass the beauty of the views which the ascent gives over the bay with its islands and all the way southeastward to the mountains that surround Rio.

Petropolis is a pretty little spot, nestling under steep hills, its streets well planted and shady, its rows of shops which address themselves to the summer visitor reminding one of a Pyrenean or Rhenish bathing place. But the charm of its surroundings is beyond that of any place in Europe, for in no temperate clime are such landscapes with such woods and such colours to be found. Here, better even than in the neighbourhood of Rio, one can explore the glens and penetrate the forests on foot, wherever a path can be found to follow, for to force one's way along without a path, by cutting openings through the tangle of shrubs and climbers with a machete, is a task beyond the powers of the solitary walker. It is not so easy as in Europe to get to know the mountains, for the pedestrian cannot go where he will. The thickness of the wood stops him. He cannot fix upon some attractive summit and say he will climb there for a view, because access on foot, and, still more, access on horseback, is possible only where there exists a regular "trail" or well-marked path. Yet it is a genial country, fit to be loved, and not on too vast a scale, like the Himalayas or the Andes. When one rambles along the valleys, new beauties appear as the mountains group and regroup themselves with rock peaks springing unexpectedly out of the forest, and new waterfalls disclose themselves along the course of the brooks, for in this land of showers every hollow has its stream. The heights are sufficient to give dignity,93 and the forms are endlessly varied, with here and there open pastures or slopes of rocky ground rising to a rocky peak, while the heat is tempered by the elevation and by the seldom failing breeze.

We learnt still more of the character of the country in an excursion over the Leopoldina railway, down into the valley of the Parahyba River, and back up one of its tributary glens, to the top of the Coast Range whence we descended to the coast at Nictheroy opposite Rio. In general one does not get the best impression of any scenery, and perhaps least of forest scenery, from a railroad. Here, however, a railroad must be turned to account, because roads are few and driving difficult. Our train moved slowly and the rains had laid the dust.

This Leopoldina railway (the property of a British company, to the kindness of whose managers we were greatly beholden) descends a narrow valley, hemmed in by steep mountains whose projecting spurs and buttresses turn hither and thither the course of the foaming river. Right and left waterfalls leap over the cliffs to swell its waters. The slopes are mostly too steep for tillage, but here and there a cluster of houses clings to the slopes, and round them there are fruit trees and maize fields or little gardens. At last the ravine widens and we emerge into the broad valley, bordered by lower hills, of the Parahyba, one of the chief rivers of the Atlantic side of Brazil. Running down it, through a rich country, we stopped at a wayside station to take horse and ride up to a Fazenda (estate) whose hospitable owner had invited us to see his coffee plantations and live stock. The house, set on a hill with a pretty garden below it and charming views all round, and inhabited by a large family of his children and grandchildren, gave a pleasant impression of Brazilian rural life. Here was simplicity with abundance, the beauty of groves and flowers, a bountiful Nature, labourers, nearly all negroes, who seemed contented and attached to their kindly master. A band of coloured people turned out to greet us and played the national air of Britain. The plantation and stock farms are managed by the owner and his son, who take pleasure in having everything done in the best way. We saw the process, quite an elaborate one, and carried on by machinery, of washing and drying the coffee-beans, sorting them out by size and quality, separating the husks and membranous coverings from the beans before they are fit to be packed and shipped. Coffee is an exhausting crop. Fresh land must be taken in from time to time and the old land allowed to rest; and we were to see next day many tracts where it used to be cultivated, which have now been abandoned to forest because the soil had ceased to repay tillage. A large piece of ground was ready to be planted with young coffee-plants, and we were asked to inaugurate it by planting the first trees, which was done to the accompaniment of rockets let off by the negroes in the full afternoon sunlight. The love of fireworks, carried by the peoples of southern Europe to the New World, reaches its acme among their coloured dependants.

Leaving with regret this idyllic home, we sped all too quickly down the vale of the Parahyba. Everyone knows that there is nothing more beautiful than the views one gets in following a river. But here we felt as if we had not known before how beautiful a valley can be till this Brazilian one was seen in its warm light, with the heavy shadows of tropic clouds falling upon woods and pastures, the broad stream now sparkling over the shallows, now reflecting the clouds from its placid bosom. The nearer ridges that fell softly on either side were crowned with villages clustering round white church spires; other ridges rose one behind another to the west, their outlines fading in the haze of distance. Not often in the tropics does one get the openness and the mingling of cornfields and meadows with forest which make the charm of south European scenery. Here the landscape had that Italian quality one finds in Claude and in the backgrounds of Titian but bathed in the intenser light of a Brazilian sun. In Brazil, as in Mexico, scenery that is both splendid and romantic stands awaiting the painter who is worthy to place it on canvas.

At last, turning away from the Parahyba, which the main line of railway follows to the sea, we mounted by a branch up a lateral valley, passed through great stretches of rough pasture land into the higher region of thick woods, and halted for the night in the midst of a thunderstorm which pealed and growled and flashed all night long, as often happens in these latitudes where one bank of clouds comes up after another to renew the discharges. Next morning the line, after keeping along the heights for some miles, descended through a forest more wonderful in its exuberance than any we had yet seen. From the summit we looked over a wilderness of deep valleys, the waving green of their tree-tops seamed with the white flash of waterfalls, with many ranges and peaks rising in the far distance, few of whose tops any European foot had pressed, for it is only the bottoms of the valleys that are inhabited. The views were all the more beautiful because the precipices on the hillsides beneath which we passed were dripping with rivulets from last night's rain, and cascades leapt over a succession of rock ledges and hurried in foaming channels down the bottoms of the glens.

In the hollow of the valley lies a quiet little town called Novo Friburgo, because first inhabited by a Swiss colony brought here many years ago to grow coffee. These Brazilian villages are loosely built, the houses scattered along wide streets, among spreading trees, and this one had retained something of the trimness of the industrious people who first settled it. Many of the coffee plantations of forty or even thirty years ago have been abandoned, and their sites are now practically undistinguishable from the rest of the forest. How long it will take for the land to recover its pristine vigour is not yet known, and there is still so much virgin land waiting to be planted that the question is of more importance to the individual owner than to the nation at large.

From this smiling vale the line climbs another high ridge and then descends once more through a long valley to the level land that lies behind the bay of Rio, coming out at last in the town of Nictheroy opposite the city.

This long run through the mountains on the top of the ridges and down along the terraces cut out in their sides, whence one can look over great spaces of woodland, completed the impressions of the forest which our excursions round Rio and Petropolis had given. Regarded as a piece of Nature's work, these Brazilian forests are more striking than those of the eastern Himalayas or of the Nilghiri Hills in India, more striking even than that beautiful little forest at Hilo in Hawaii, which no one who has visited that extraordinary island can ever forget. It is not that these Brazilian trees are very lofty. I was told that further north there are places where the great trunks reach two hundred feet, but here none seemed to exceed, and not very many to reach, one hundred. Thus, as respects either height or girth or general stateliness of aspect, these trees of the Serra do Mar are not to be compared either to the so-called "Big Trees" of California94 or to the red woods of the Pacific Coast Range,95 nor do they equal the forests of the Cascade Range above Puget Sound, where many of the Douglas firs and the so-called "cedars" approach, and some are said to exceed, three hundred feet. But they have a marvellous variety and richness of colour both in flowers and leaves. Very few – in this part I could see none – are coniferous, but very many are evergreen, changing their leaves not all at the same time, like the deciduous trees of temperate countries, but each tree at its own time, so that there are always some with fresh leaves coming as the others are beginning to go. The variety of tints is endless, from the dark glossy green of many a forest tree to the light green of the bamboos. Some leaves have white undersurfaces, which when turned up by the wind are bright enough to give the effect of flowers; and one tree, frequent in these mountains, has a group of what seem white bracts round the corymb at the end of its flower-shoots. Still more varied and still more brilliant are the flowers. These are seen best from above because it is the highest boughs touched by the sun that burst forth into the most abundant blossoms. Though we were too early in the hot season to see the blossom-bearing trees at their best, the wealth of colour was delightful even in November. Yellow and white were perhaps the most frequent, but there were also bright pinks and purples and violets. Palms rising here and there often high above the rest gave a variety of tint and form, while the space between the trunks was filled by tree-ferns rising to twenty feet and by a bewildering profusion of climbing and hanging and parasitic plants, many of them girdling the boughs with flowers. There were far more than anybody could give me names for, and as I had no means of ascertaining the scientific names, it would not serve the reader to give the popular Portuguese ones, especially as I found that the same name was sometimes applied to quite different plants because their colour was similar.

It is in a region like this that one begins to realize the amazing energy of nature. In the Andes we had seen the power of what are called the inanimate forces acting from beneath to shake the earth and break through its solid crust. There heat, acting upon water, has produced volcanic explosions and piled up gigantic cones like Misti and Tupungato, and has destroyed by earthquakes cities like Valparaiso or Mendoza. Here heat and water are again the force and the matter on which the force works; but here it is through life that they act. Every inch of ground is covered with some living and growing thing. While the tall stems push upward to overtop their fellows and let their highest shoots put forth flowers under the sunlight, climbing plants slender as a vine-shoot or stout as a liana embrace the trunk and mount along the branches and hang in swinging festoons from tree to tree. The fallen trunks are covered thick with ferns and mosses. Orchids and many another parasite root themselves in the living stem, and make it gay, to its ultimate undoing, with blossoms not its own. Even the bare faces of gneiss rock, too steep for any soil to rest upon, support a plant with a thick whorl of succulent leaves that is somehow able to find sustenance from air and moisture only, its roots anchored into some slight roughness of the rock. When a patch of wood has been cut down to the very ground, five years suffice to cover the soil again with a growth of trees and shrubs so rank that the spot can scarcely be distinguished from the uncut forest all round. But this swift activity of life is hardly more wonderful than is the variety of forms. Each of the great forests of Europe and North America consists of a few species of trees. In the New Forest in England, most beautiful of all, in one place chiefly beeches are found, in another chiefly oaks, mixed, perhaps, with some birches and white thorns. The woods of Maine and New Hampshire are composed of maples and birches, white pines and hemlocks and spruces, with now and then some less frequent tree. In the majestic forests of the Pacific coast there are seldom more than three or four of the larger species present in any quantity and this is generally true also of the Eucalyptus forests of Australia. But on this Brazilian coast the diversity is endless. Those who have traversed the Amazonian forests have made the same remark. There as here you may find within a radius of eighty yards, forty kinds of trees growing side by side, species belonging to different families with myriad shapes and hues of leaf and flower. Not content with the abundance of its production, this creative energy of nature insists on expressing itself also in an endless variety of forms. Do any principles which naturalists have yet discovered quite explain such a marvellous diversity where the conditions are the same?

After the doctrine of the Struggle for Life had been once propounded by two great naturalists who had seen, one of them South America, and the other, the tropical islands of the Further East, men soon learnt to recognize and observe the working of the principle in every part of the earth until in the arid desert or the freezing north a land was reached where life itself was extinct. But it is in Brazil that the principle is seen in the fulness of its potency. Here, where life is so profuse, so multiform, so incessantly surging around like the waves of a restless sea, this law of nature's action seems to speak from every rustling leaf, and the forest proclaims it with a thousand voices.

Rambling round Rio, and noting the physical characteristics of the ground it occupies, the rocky hills and the promontories and the islands, the traveller is reminded of the historic cities of Greece and Italy and naturally asks himself: Supposing Rio to have been one of those cities, where would the Acropolis have been, and where would the citizens have met in their assembly before they rushed to attack a tyrant, and to what sea-girt fortress would a ruler have sent his captives by water as the East Roman emperors seized their enemies and sent them into exile from the Bosphorus? Then, remembering that few streets or hills in Rio have any associations with the past, he wonders whether such associations will come into being in the future, and whether insurrections and civic conflicts may ever render some of these spots famous. In old cities like Florence and Paris and Edinburgh historic memories make a great part of the interest of the place. How much of English history connects itself with the Tower of London and with Westminster Hall! It so happened that during our stay in Rio there befell an incident which shewed that the smooth surface of things may, even in our own days, be troubled by explosive passions, an incident which revealed a new kind of danger to which in times of domestic strife modern engines of warfare may subject a maritime town.

On the day when we were to embark for Bahia and Europe, we started early in the morning from Petropolis to come down by train to Rio, and heard at the station rumours of a revolution, confused rumours, for no one could say from whom the revolution, if there was one, proceeded or against whom it was directed. When we reached Rio, things cleared up a little. It was not a political revolution nor a military pronunciamento, but a marine mutiny. The crews, almost entirely negroes, of the two great Dreadnought battleships which the Brazilian government had recently ordered and purchased from an English firm of shipbuilders, and which had shortly before arrived in the harbour, had revolted during the night. The captain of one of the vessels, the Minas Geraes, had been murdered by his crew as he stepped on board upon his return from dining on a French ship. The story ran that he had been first pierced by bayonets and then hewed in pieces with hatchets. Of the other officers some few had been killed, the rest put on shore. The only white men left on board were some English engineers forcibly detained in order to work the engines. The crews of a cruiser and two smaller war vessels had joined in the revolt. All the ships were in the hands of the crews, who, however, were believed to be obeying non-commissioned officers of their own colour, and who were led by a negro named João Candido,96 a big man of energy and resolution, who had shewn his grasp of the situation by ordering all the liquor on the Minas Geraes to be thrown overboard. The grievances alleged by the seamen were overwork, insufficient wages, and the frequency of corporal punishments. Rumours were busy connecting the names of prominent politicians with the outbreak, but so far as could be made out then or subsequently there was no foundation for these suspicions. The mutiny seems to have been the spontaneous act of the crews, who, it was remarked, had just arrived from Lisbon, lately the scene of a revolution, and might have there caught the infection of rebellion. In demanding the redress of their grievances, which was, of course, to be accompanied by an amnesty for themselves, they had threatened to lay the city in ashes, enforcing the threat by firing some shots into it (not, however, from the heavy guns). One shot killed two children, and several other persons were wounded.