Part 10 (1/2)
Through this country runs one of the world's greatest rivers, the Orinoco, which with its tributaries furnishes more than four thousand miles of navigable rivers. This great river system drains a territory of three hundred and sixty thousand square miles.
It is rather strange that in this country with lovely and productive valleys whose irrigated orchards and gardens make a regular paradise, that the farming cla.s.ses should be poor and ignorant, without ambition or education and be satisfied to live in comfortless, tumble-down huts without furniture or any of the improvements that make life worth living. But such is the case. Here where there are millions of coffee trees, fields of sugar cane and orchards of oranges, lemons and all kinds of tropical fruit, where the farmer could be happiest, he is about the most miserable creature that could be found. In his miserable home he has no lamp or candle, no books or papers of any sort.
While Venezuela is rich in mines and forests, grain and livestock, coffee and rubber, dyes and medicines, gold and copper, lead and coal, to say nothing of tropical fruits and vegetables, she has another product that makes her known the world around. This is asphalt, or mineral pitch as it is sometimes called. This makes the smoothest street paving of any material known. It is also used extensively for calking vessels, making waterproof roofs, lining cold storage plants, making varnishes as well as shoe blacking as well as in a hundred other ways.
At the mouth of the Orinoco river is the Island of Trinidad upon which is the famous pitch lake. This is the most noted deposit of asphalt known. This lake is a mile and a half across and looks, from a distance, like a pond surrounded with trees. Nearing it, however, one soon discovers that it contains anything but water.
This material is of a dark green color and at the border is hard and strong enough to bear quite a heavy weight, but near the center it is almost like a boiling ma.s.s. The asphalt is dug from the edges of the lake, loaded on carts, hauled to the port and from there s.h.i.+pped to nearly every country on the globe. Two hundred thousand tons per year have been taken from the lake and yet there is no hole to be seen. Negro workmen dig it to the depth of a couple of feet and in a week or so the hole is level with the top again.
The government of Trinidad has leased the asphalt lake to an American company and the income amounts to nearly a quarter of a million dollars per year. n.o.body knows how deep the asphalt bed is for borings have been made a hundred feet or more deep and there was no bottom. The heat is intense all around this lake.
About fifty miles from the coast in Venezuela there is another asphalt lake and the material in it is of finer quality than at Trinidad, but it is hard to reach. Some believe that the two deposits are connected by a subterranean pa.s.sage and supplied from the same source. It was from this inland lake of asphalt that the material was procured to protect the New York subway tunnels from moisture, so it is said.
In the central part of Venezuela are the llanos which are said to be about the best pasture lands in the world. The chief industry here is cattle raising. More than two million head of cattle feed, upon these llanos, but they are capable of feeding many times that number.
One reason why the people of this country have no ambition to lay up for the future or even get large herds of cattle has been because of the numerous revolutions of the past. Every time they have succeeded in getting large herds of cattle or stores of grain a revolution would come and their property be seized and often destroyed.
No people can be prosperous and happy without a stable government, schools and colleges and the influences that are uplifting. This is the great need of many of the countries of South America today. Just here it is well for the farmers of this country to congratulate themselves. The writer of these lines has traveled nearly all over the world and having been a farmer all his early life it is only natural that he would try to study the problems of the farmers in all lands.
It is therefore with pride that one can say that considering all the complex problems with which the American farmer has to grapple, he is a hundred times better off than his brother farmers in any country in the world. He is more independent, has more privileges, more opportunities for making the most of life, has higher ideals, and lives better than the tillers of the soil in any other country on earth.
CHAPTER XX
A LAND OF GREAT INDUSTRIES--BRAZIL
You could take a map of the whole United States, lay it down on Brazil and still have room for England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Denmark and Switzerland left. Walk around Brazil and you have traveled a distance equal to two-thirds of a journey around the globe. If every man, woman and child in the United States were placed in Matto Gra.s.so, the state in Brazil where Roosevelt discovered the ”River of Doubt,” in 1914, that state would not have as many people to the square mile as England has at this moment. If all the people on earth were placed in Brazil the population of that country would not be as dense as that of Belgium today.
Brazil could produce enough rubber to supply the whole world with automobile tires for generations and never have to plant another rubber tree to do it, that is, of course, if all her rubber forests could be utilized. From a single Brazilian port is s.h.i.+pped one-fourth of all the coffee used in the whole world. In a single Brazilian state there are ten thousand coffee plantations that have more than fifty thousand trees each and six hundred of them have more than one hundred thousand trees each.
Brazil might be called the ”jewel box” of the world. Her diamond fields rival those of South Africa. Her mines produced a single stone that sold for fifteen million dollars. One writer says: ”Of all the fabulous tales related of bonanza princes the palm for extravagance belongs to the early mining days of Brazil, when horses were shod with gold, when lawyers supported their pleadings before judges with gifts of what appeared at first sight to be oranges and bananas, but proved to be solid gold imitations, when guests were entertained at dinner with pebbles of gold in their soup and when nuggets were the most convenient medium of exchange in the money market.”
Would you like to go nutting? Brazil has the greatest groves on earth.
Some of these nut trees grow to a height of a hundred and fifty feet and have a girth of twenty feet, fifty feet up from the ground. A single tree is said to produce as many as three tons of nuts during a season.
In the trees of Brazil are found sixteen hundred species of birds. There are parrots galore and sixty-five varieties of woodp.e.c.k.e.rs have been catalogued. One family of birds in Brazil are said to be devout Christians as they never work but six days in the week.
One would naturally suppose that in Brazil the weather would be extremely hot as the equator runs across the great Amazon valley. But the nights are cool and sunstroke is unknown. Frost can be seen in the highlands at certain times in the year. While fevers rage in parts of the land, yet most of the country is conducive to good health. The very dangerous parts of the Amazon valley are limited to certain parts of the country.
Some years ago at a contest in Paris between twelve hundred children the first prize for healthy appearance was given to a boy born in Manaos of Amazonian parents. This city is in the very heart of the jungle in the Amazon valley. There is one authenticated case of a man in this valley who lived to be one hundred and forty-five years old.
In the dense forests of the uplands of Brazil there are people who are living in the stone age of culture. They are practically wild tribes who know nothing about the use of metal, in fact, they know but little about civilization. They are said to be ignorant of common food such as bananas and rice. They seem to have no idea of a supreme being, believe in a soul that goes wandering about after death.
In some parts of Brazil rice is cultivated quite extensively and it makes a cheap food. It is said that in one place a man from Louisiana is running an experimental rice farm showing the Brazilian farmers how to cultivate j.a.panese rice. Rather strange, isn't it, that United States farmers should be teaching the Brazilian farmers j.a.panese agriculture?
A peculiar thing about the land of Brazil is the absence of earth worms.
In our country these worms improve the physical condition of the soil but there this lack is made up by the multiplied millions of ants that burrow down deep into the earth. In our country, too, the chemical changes of winter help prepare the soil for the coming crops, but in Brazil there is no winter season when the land ”sleeps” and it does not seem to be necessary.
While in the great rubber industry of Brazil the trees grow and produce with but little if any cultivation, this is not true of the coffee trees. They have to be cultivated and carefully looked after. Insect pests that are so destructive to coffee trees in many countries, are almost absent in Brazil and this fact has not a little to do with making this the greatest coffee country in the world. In the state of Sao Paulo almost the entire energies of the people are absorbed in the coffee industry.