1852.] PORTUGUESE TRADERS. 261
every respect is this part of the Empire from the more southern and better-known portion. There is, perhaps, no country in the world so capable of yielding a large return for agricultural labour, and yet so little cultivated ; none where the earth will produce such a variety of valuable productions, and where they are so totally neglected ; none where the facilities for internal communication are so great, or where it is more difficult or tedious to get from place to place ; none which so much possesses all the natural requisites for an immense trade with all the world, and where commerce is so limited and insignifi- cant.
This may well excite some wonder, when we remember that the white inhabitants of this country are the Portuguese and their descendants, — the nation which a few centuries ago took the lead in all great discoveries and commercial enterprises, — which spread its colonies over the whole world, and exhibited the most chivalric spirit of enterprise in overcoming the dangers of navigation in unknown seas, and of opening a commercial intercourse with barbarous or uncivilised nations.
But yet, as far as I myself have been able to observe, their national character has not changed. The Portuguese, and their descendants, exhibit here the same perseverance, the same endurance of every hardship, and the same wandering spirit, which led and still leads them to penetrate into the most desolate and uncivilised regions in pursuit of commerce and in search of gold. But they exhibit also a distaste for agricultural and mechanical labour, which appears to have been ever a part of their national character, and which has caused them to sink to their present low condition in the scale of nations, in what- ever part of the world they may be found. When their colonies were nourishing in every quarter of the globe, and their ships brought luxuries for the supply of half the civilised world, a great part of their population found occupation in trade, in the distribution of that wealth which set in a constant stream from America, Asia, and Africa, to their shores ; but now that this stream has been diverted into other channels by the energy of the Saxon races, the surplus population, averse from agricul- ture, and unable to find a support in the diminished trade of the country, swarm to Brazil, in the hope that wealth may be found there, in a manner more congenial to their tastes.
Thus we find the province of Para overrun with traders, the
