“Stern winter smiles on this auspicious clime; The fields are florid in eternal prime; From the bleak pole no winds inclement blow, Mould the round hail, or flake the fleecy snow; But from the breezy deep the groves inhale The fragrant murmurs of the eastern gale!”
Rather prefatory and not very particular, though somewhat personal.—Books on Brazil should be in _Mediam Viam_ for the present route, avoiding the Scylla of extreme succinctness and the Charybdis of needless diffuseness.—Object of the Author to attain the golden medium.—With what success, gentle reader, say?—Discovery of the country by the Portuguese. Their subsequent disputes with, and final expulsion of the Dutch.—Extent and Population; variety of soil and produce.—Difficulty of communication between the provinces and the capital, in consequence of extreme distance and imperfect means of travelling.—Extraordinary instance of the roundabout nature of news circulating in Brazil some time ago.—Steam corrective of such sluggishness.—A glance at the Brazilian littoral, beginning with the Amazon, and ending with Rio Grande do Sul.—Pará and its productions.—Rio Negro, and its recent political elevation.—Maranham and its Mercantile importance.—Laird’s steam leveller, on the singular stream of the Itapecuru.—Justice for England by Maranham Magistrates.—Piauhy and its products; also Ceara, Rio Grande do Norte, and Paraiba.—Pernambuco revisited by the writer, and welcomed with a rhythmetical sentimental something concerning ‘Long, long, ago!’
Let not the reader suppose, from the heading of this chapter, ‘Empire of Brazil,’ that he is going to encounter either a dilution or a condensation of Southey, Kidder, Weech, Mawe, Prince Adalbert, St. Hilaire, and others, who have written at great length and in many languages, on so fertile and so expansive a theme. The object of the author in this portion of the volume is merely, by presenting at a glance the position and condition of Brazil generally, to enable those who accompany him in these pages the more readily to recognize the points he is about to put hereafter as the result of his own experience, more especially with reference to the machinery of commercial matters in Brazil. It is often the fault of men very full of a particular subject themselves to take for granted that the public either know a very great deal, or wish to know everything about it. Brazil has suffered much from both these causes in European, and especially in English estimation. Those familiar with and competent to write about it, have either presumed that the public were nearly as wise as themselves, and have passed over matters of great interest, believing them to be stale and exhausted, and dwelling upon the trivialities of personal travel by way of varying a beaten track:—or, on the other hand, the exhaustive process has been applied, and historic and topographic disquisition have been employed with a minuteness that would be only tolerated in English county gazetteers or family chronicles. The consequence is that all but the student or the virtuoso in such matters have been repelled from their perusal. When the idea of writing this book occurred to the author—an idea suggested by frequent inquiries for works that should, in a brief compass, give a tolerable notion of things to be met with and that ought to be known in a route of yearly increasing importance between two quarters of the globe—it was suggested that he should steer between the two extremes just indicated. He has endeavoured to do so; and without further circumlocution, he places before the reader the means of deciding with what success.