The sugar-cane and mandioca require from fourteen to eighteen months. Coffee, planted by shoots, bears fruit in two years, and is in perfection in five or six years. Cottons and palma Christi, raised from seed, bear the first year.
Transplanting is only practised with tobacco; engrafting is little known and rarely attempted.
The Indian corn is ground by a horizontal water-wheel, which acquires great velocity from the rush of water upon it. On the upper end is fixed the mill-stone, which makes from fifty to sixty revolutions in a minute. They have likewise a mode of pounding the corn into flour, by a machine called a Sloth. Near a current of water a large wooden mortar is placed, the pestle of which is mortised into the end of a lever twenty-five or thirty feet long, resting upon a fulcrum at five-eights of its length. The extremity of the shorter arm of this beam is scooped out, so as to receive a sufficient weight of water to raise the other end, to which appends the pestle, and to discharge itself when it has sunk to a given point. The alternate emptying and filling of this cavity cause the elevation and fall of the pestle, which take place about four times per minute. This contrivance surpasses all others in simplicity; and in a place where the waste of water is of no consequence, it completely answers its purpose.
[Illustration: Mandioca first set cuttings.
Nearly full grown & appearance of the Root.]
Having finished my affairs at Canta Gallo, I set out on my return to the capital, accompanied for about a league of the road by the worthy governor, the captain, the treasurer, and almost all the inhabitants. During a residence of about fifteen days among these excellent men, my table had been sumptuously supplied without cost, and I had been treated with a degree of respect far exceeding my expectations or merits. I took leave of them with regret, wishing most sincerely that it might be in my power to be of service to them at court, by making representations in their favor.
I arrived at Morro Queimado at night, after a journey of thirty-four miles[32], and on the next day, in good time, reached the house of my worthy friend Captain Ferreira. Being now less pressed for time, I took a more leisurely survey of his establishment, particularly of his sugarwork and distillery, both which are very ill conducted. When I saw the furnaces for heating the coppers in the latter, I freely told the Captain, that they could not have been constructed on a worse plan, but I received for answer, that no better was known. It would, indeed, be extremely difficult to introduce improvements into this or any other parts of the distillery, for every thing is left to the management of the negroes. When I asked any question concerning the process, the owner professed his ignorance of it, and sent for one of the African foremen to answer me. With this man I reasoned respecting the excessive quantity of fuel consumed to no purpose, and proposed a method for saving it, as well as for correcting the disagreeable taste of the rum, caused by the empyreuma; which was, to redistil it with an equal quantity of water, taking care previously to clean out the still; but he only laughed at me, and signified that his certainly must be the best method, for he had learned it of an old sugar-maker. Thus it is, that from the indifference of the owners to their own interest, things are suffered to go on in the same routine, being left to the direction of men who shrink from a temporary increase of labor, even when it promises them a lasting advantage. This aversion to improvement I have often observed among the inhabitants of Brazil: when, for instance, I have questioned a brick-maker, a sugar-maker, a soap-boiler, or even a miner, as to his reasons for conducting his concerns in such an imperfect manner, I have been almost invariably referred to a negro for answers to my interrogatories.