S ee APIS ET Mer sy aa , ey ise! SNS font oe - 2 : . , TE oo he , & NG q LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PRINCETON, N. J. PURCHASED BY THE MRS, ROBERT LENOX KENNEDY CHURCH HISTORY FUND. nm E2537 .G74 1925 Cunninghame Graham, R. B. 1852-1936 A Brazilian mystic hy bhi ) hs nit me i sen ' ) pe aR A wi AAR 4) | ay hi uy vA A BRAZILIAN MYSTIC BEING THE LIFE AND MIRACLES OF ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/brazilianmysticb0Ocunn_0 A BRAZILIAN MYSTIC BEING THE LIFE AND-MIRACLES OF ANTONIO “CONSELHEIRO BY R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM ‘‘ Adeus, campo, 6 adeus matto Adeus, casa onde morsi ! Ja’ que é forgoso partir Algum dia te verei!’’ Brazilian Rhyme. Lincoln MacUVeagb THE DIAL PRESS INCORPORATED NEW YORK - MCMXXV Printed in Great Britain by BILLING & Sons, Lrp., GUILDFORD AND ESHER, TO MY VALUED FRIEND DON JOSE MARIA BRACERAS PREFACE SOME years ago, when he was President, after having read some tales of mine about the Gauchos, the late Colonel Roosevelt wrote a letter tome. In it he said: “What you and Hudson have done for South America, many have done for our frontiersmen in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Others have written of the Mexican frontiersmen, and written well about them. No one, as far as I know,” so he said, “has touched the subject of the frontiersmen of Brazil. Why don’t you do it? for you have been there, know them, and speak their lingo. The field is open to you.” I was duly flattered and turned the question over in my mind; then forgot all about it. Things of importance, such as going out to dinner and endeavour- ing to arrive neither too early nor too late, but just exactly to descend before the door at the right moment —that is to say two or three minutes before eight— came in between the Brazilian frontiersman and my memory, as they are apt to do in civilised sociéty. The years went by, with each one certifying his fellow that had passed, in blameless endeavour, such as that I have described. Then came the war, and on my passage out to Uruguay, I found myself one morning entering the harbour of Bahia, on the Brazilian coast. The sea was Vil Vill PREFACE oily; ‘‘ Portuguese men-of-war” hoisted their fairy little sails, and as the vessel slowed down to half speed, passing the ruinous old fort at the entrance of the bay, backed by a grove of coco-palms looking like ostrich feathers, she put up shoals of flying fish that swept along the surface of the waves, just as a flock of swallows sweep across a field. The red-roofed city, with its spires and convents, its tall old houses, those in the lower part reaching up almost to the foundations of the houses on the cliff, was unrolled, as it were, in a gigantic cinematograph as the ship steamed into the bay. Eight or ten German vessels were interned and rode at anchor, blistering inthesun. Fleets of the curious catamarans, known as jangadas in Brazil, were making out to sea. Their occupants sat upon a little stool, on the three logs that constitute the embarkation, with feet almost awash, whilst the white-pointed little sails gave the jangadas an air of copying the nautiluses. Myriads of islands dotted the surface of the vast inlet, the houses on them painted sky-blue and pink or a pale yellow colour. So fair the scene was from the vessel’s deck, it seemed that one had come into a land so peaceful that it was quite impossible there could exist in it evil or malice, hatred and envy, or any of the vices or the crimes that curse humanity. One understood the feelings of the apostles when they wished to build their tabernacles ; only the difficulty of finding an Elias or a Moses worth while to build a shanty for, restrained one from incontinently taking up some land and starting in to build. I stood still gazing, when a voice beside me broke PREFACE ix the spell, bringing me back again to reality, or the illusion of reality that we delude ourselves is life. “Friend Don Roberto,” said the voice, “ what things have happened in Bahia! and that not long ago. Scarcely two hundred miles from where we stand took place the rising of Antonio Conselheiro, the last of the Gnostics, who defied all the Brazilian forces for a year or so, and was eventually slain with all his followers. The episode took place not more than five- and-twenty years ago; you ought to read and then to write about it, for it was made by Providence on purpose for you, and is well fitted to your pen.” I turned and saw my friend Braceras standing by my side, dressed in immaculate white duck. He wore a jipi-japa hat, that must have cost him at the least a hundred dollars. His small and well-arched feet, encased in neat buckskin shoes, showed him a Spaniard of the Spaniards from old Castile, just where it borders on Vizcaya, and the race is purest of the pure. He had the easy manners and the complete immunity from self-preoccupation that makes a man the equal of a king, and just as much at home with fishermen, with cattle-drovers, or any other class of men, as if he were one of them. His hands were nervous, and his blue-black hair was just beginning to turn grey, whilst his dark eyes, his bushy eyebrows, and his closely- shaven face, gave him the look of an ecclesiastic, though not of those whose function is but to say Mass and eat his dinner, as the old adage goes. The name of Conselheiro was known to me but vaguely, although I knew religious movements had been continuous in Brazil since the discovery. I listened to the story, and, x PREFACE when we landed at the capital, bought books about it, bought more in Santos, and as I read and mused upon the tale, the letter from the President came back into my mind. The events all happened in the wild region known as the Sertao,* lying between the States of Pernambuco and Bahia, unknown, I take it, geographically, to ninety-nine per cent. of educated men. The followers of Antonio Conselheiro were, almost to a man, what are known as Jaguncos, a term invented for the most prominent of the cattle men who live in the Sertao, and signifying something between a bully and a fighting-cock, and by degrees applied to all of them, as the term Gaucho is in Argentina, Guaso in Chile, and Llanero in the vast, grassy plains upon the Orinoco, to the same class of man. ’Tis true they did not live upon a frontier, except the ever- shifting barrier between the old world and the new, or that which just as constantly is changing its position and its course, betwixt our modern life and medievalism. Still, these are frontiers just as well marked indeed as those that arbitrarily separate two countries—in fact, are really better far defined. As I read on about the semi-Gnostic and his adventures of the spirit, and the adventurous lives his followers led, although they too, or most of them, were deeply tinged with either superstition or religion—for who shall say where the one ends and his twin brother starts >—lI felt Braceras * Sertdéo may be translated “ highlands,’’ though that does not entirely give the sense of the word, which infers what we call ‘* back- lying” in Scotland. It is a high plateau, covered with scrub. The mark over the “a,” called “til” in Portuguese, gives a nasal sound, almost as if the word were written “ Sertawn,” PREFACE x1 had been right in what he said about the subject, and of the interest it contained. The life in the material sense was simple: but in its background there was evidence of faith of a peculiar kind, tinged with fanaticism. ‘Their faith, as often happens, but little influenced their daily lives, which were passed in the open air on horseback, herding their cattle, dressed in their deerskin clothes. As I wrote of it, looking at the drops of moisture coursing down the window-panes (for it was autumn in the north when I began to write), I used to wonder if the sun was shining in Brazil, as I remembered it, for I could see the sodden stooks of corn out in the fields, with the rain falling on them, and on the ships in the strait, fairway channel as they crept up and down the Clyde. Although Antonio Conselheiro had paid the penalty of his credulity or faith, I felt the wild life in the Sertaéo was going on as usual, and the vaqueiros were galloping about, with their long, iron- shod cattle-goads sloped forward, just as of old the men of Annandale carried their rusty spears. I fancied I could see them land upon their feet like cats, when a horse fell with them, just as once, long ago in Entre Rios, I saw a man fall suddenly and come off running, unharmed, although his horse had its neck dislocated. A pity, too, because the horse, a little “‘ gateado,” if I remember rightly, was one that you could turn upon a hide in Gaucho phrase; and for the man—your damned bronchitis took him off, and he died slovenly, within a month or two. This kind of book is bound to find its way, and Xi PREFACE shortly, to an old bookstall, there to be sold with other bargains for a penny, after the fashion of the sparrows in the Holy Scriptures, for it treats of unfamiliar people and of a life unknown and unsuspected by the general. It is no matter, for he who writes a book writes for his own peculiar pleasure, and if he does not, he had better far abstain from writing, for that which pleases not the writer of the work can scarce please anybody. If it is fated that my account of the Jagunco mystic should lie rotting in the rain upon a stall, so be it, for so it was decreed; though it were better fitting it should cockle in the sun and shrivel up, just as a dead body shrivels up in the dry air of the Sertdo. Shrivel or rot, it is all one to me. Just as the strugele is the thing worth struggling for and the result a secondary affair, so is the writing of a book what matters to the writer of it, for he has had his fight. If it but please himself he has his public and his reward assured, in regions where the rain cannot offend him, and where the fiercest sun that ever blazed upon the sand is tempered pleasantly. R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM. ARDOCH, I919. A BRAZILIAN MYSTIC BEING THE LIFE AND MIRACLES OF ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO INTRODUCTION Wuar is called the Sertaéo* of the Brazilian provinces of Pernambuco and Bahia is one of the most curious regions of South America. It is also one of the least known to the outside world. Life goes on there much as it has gone on for the last three hundred years. The people mostly are engaged in cattle farming, and live on horseback. They dress in leather, on account of the dense scrub ; their daily lives are hard and perilous; religion occupies a chief place in their minds. The two provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco meet in the vague region of the Sertdo, an elevated plateau between two thousand and three thousand feet in height, backed by more or less pronounced ranges of mountains or of hills, whose distance from the coast rarely exceeds two hundred or two hundred and fifty miles. This plateau has a climate and a flora of its own, the former ranging from great extremes of heat to a considerable degree of cold, taking into considera- tion the latitude in which it lies. * Sertéo is a word hardly possible to translate except by a peri- phrasis. It means “ wooded, back-lying highlands,” I 2 LIFE AND MIRACLES OF The flora chiefly consists of thorny trees and plants, known in Brazil as “ caatinga,” a Tupi word signifying “‘ bush or scrub.” The country gradually rises from the coast to the plateau of the Sertado, and the climate, vegetation, and soil of it are all widely different from those of the littoral districts. All these conditions, together with the isolation in which they have lived for three hundred years, have left their impress on the population, making them a race apart—a race of centaurs, deeply imbued with fanaticism, strong, honest, revengeful, primitive, and refractory to modern ideas and life to an extraordinary degree. Their existence centres, and has always done so, round their cattle, for the Sertdo is little fitted for most kinds of agriculture. The arid nature of the soil, the long-continued droughts, the extraordinary difference of the temperature between the day and night, all tend to make the Sertanejos (z.e., the inhabi- tants of the Sertéo) a people set apart from all the world. Their ancestors, when they left Portugal, had just emerged from their long contest with the Moors. To them, religion was not a faith only, but a mark of race—a rallying-point, a war-cry, and a bond uniting them to one another, in a way difficult for modern men to understand. With us religion is a personal thing ; we take it, according to our indi- vidual temperament, in many differing ways. Some, not the highest minds, look on it as a sort of mumbo- jumbo whereby to save their souls. Others, again, regard it as a means whereby life is ennobled, death’s terrors exorcised, and the world improved. ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO 3 The Portuguese, when they set out to colonise Brazil, I fancy, looked at religion chiefly from the point of view of nationality. If you were a true Portuguese, white on all four sides, as ran the saying, you were a Christian. You could not be otherwise, for Jews and Moors and other infidel were all the enemies, both of the true faith and of your native land. Although the Portuguese held the same iron faith as did the Spaniards of those times, yet in their nature there was a vein of almost northern mysticism—a belief in fairies, spirits of the night and of the moun- tain, a fear of werwolves, and a sort of sentimentalism, especially to be observed in the two northern provinces, in which the Celtic strain of blood was most pre- dominant. Thus were the people, both by descent and by their isolated life, especially susceptible to wild religious creeds, and were, in fact, in point of faith, mental equipment, and religious temperament, not very much unlike some of the Gnostic sects in Asia Minor in the first and second centuries. In the fashion of the Gnostic sects, the people of the Sertio looked to no central authority. Their parish priest, to them, was Pope, Council, and Father of the Church. There might be greater, or as great, authorities in what they called “as terras grandes” (z.¢., the great or foreign lands); but they looked on them just as one looks on death, as something terrible and vague, although not imminent. These kind of folk, so to speak, culminated in the State of Bahia, for it is there that they have always manifested their most peculiar traits. The territory is immense, bounded on the north by 4 LIFE AND MIRACLES OF the province of Sergipe del Rey and Pernambuco, on the south by Porto Seguro and Minas Geraes, on the west by Pernambuco, from which the Rio Sao Francisco separates it, and on the east by the Atlantic Ocean. It lies entirely in the tropics, from 10° to 16° south latitude, and is about three hundred and fifty miles in length by about two hundred and forty broad. Such a vast extent of territory has given room for the inhabitants of the Sertao to form a world entirely of their own. Brazil, at the time of the conquest, was divided into captaincies (capitanias), great tracts of land having been given to men styled “ donatories.”” The first event in the history of the State of Bahia is the shipwreck of Diogo Alvarez Correa, a man destined to play a curious réle in the new land to which his ship was bound. No certainty exists as to the date, except a passage in Herrera, one of the historians of the Indies, in which he says, speaking of the shipwreck of two Spanish vessels that left San Lucar de Barrameda, in September, 1534, and were wrecked on the Brazilian coast in 1635: ‘‘ Here they found a Portuguese who said that there were five-and-twenty years he had been amongst the Indians.”* This Portuguese, one Diogo Alvarez Correa, had by the time that he was found, after his long residence amongst the Indians, become a man of note. His name amongst them was Caramaru, which is in- terpreted “the man of fire”— a title that he had acquired by having brought a gun ashore with him. * “ Onde hallaron un Portuguez que dixo que avia veyente y cinco afios que estaua entre los Indios.” ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO 5 Henderson, in his “ History of Brazil,’* says that in his time (1821) a man still living at Port Seguro had in his possession an .old manuscript which affirms that Gaspar de Lemos, one of the first discoverers of Brazil, upon a voyage back to Portugal, entered the River Ilheos, near Bahia, landed, and was suddenly attacked by Indians. Correa, one of his crew, had no time to re-embark, and thus remained amongst the savages. As he had married many times and oft, amongst the Indians, and spoke their language, he was a valuable man to find. In the wrecked Spanish vessel came the first donatory, one Francisco Peyreya Coutinho, a person- age of rank. Coutinho was a Portuguese fidalgo+— 7e., a nobleman who had but recently returned from India, where he had served with honour and rendered important services to the State. The King, Don John III., having divided all Brazil into capitanias, granted Coutinho all the country lying between the point of Padrao, now known as San Antonio and the River San Francisco, together with the Reconcava of Bahia—~.e., the greater part of the extensive bay. This gentleman fitted out his expedition after the fashion of the times. As his first action was, after having run up a stockade, to build a church, quite evidently he understood the full force of the proverb, «Pray to God, but strike home with the mace.” + His expedition comprised a chaplain, what in those days were known as reformed—ze., retired—soldiers, and * Henderson, “ History of Brazil,” London, 1821, p. 310. t Fidalgo—literally “a son of somebody, or of something.” + A Dios rogando, y con la maza dando, 6 LIFE AND MIRACLES OF many men of wealth. Brazil being a tropical country, and the Portuguese never having held the Spanish views upon the ignominy of commerce, and being less set on finding gold mines, and on the whole far less ferocious in their desire to save the souls of the poor Indians, nearly all the donatories embarked in sugar planting. Coutinho did the same, and all seemed flourishing for several years. They built a chapel on the site, where now stands the hermitage of Our Lady of the Victories. Negroes were unprocurable, as the slave trade in Brazil only began in 1574. The climate made field labour for white men almost impossible, although the Portuguese did not look down upon all manual toil, after the Spanish way. Still, labour was essential for their sugar fields, so they began to make the Indians slaves. No race of men in all the world was less inclined to sit down quietly in a slavish state than were the Indians of Brazil. Thus war was certain from the first, though the first settlers never understood the race. One thing is to the credit of the Portuguese: they seem to have made no pre- tence about the glory of the Lord as did the Spaniards, in like circumstances. So when they made a man a slave they did not trouble overmuch about his soul. Still, they were not entirely free from the ideas that influenced their age, and always took a good store of priests and friars with them to all their conquests— perhaps as a precaution, or perhaps from habit, or because it was enjoined upon them by their Govern- ment. In all the conquests of Brazil the Jesuits took a considerable share. ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO 7 Vincente Moreira, Treasurer to Our Lord the King of Portugal, in a report he makes to Mem de Sa, Governor of Brazil, laments that a chief of the Indians, whom he calls Wry-Mouth (Boca Torta), refused to give up eating human flesh, so that the Government was forced to march against him and burn his village, and after burning it, and killing many of the enemy, ordered the Jesuit father to build a church wherein mass could be said, the doctrine taught, with reading, writing, and other good customs.”* Still, the Portuguese seem to have kept their punitive expeditions, as we should call them nowadays, and their endeavours to introduce “ good customs and a knowledge of their faith, apart from one another. We never read, in Brazil at least, of a single instance of a conqueror who, as Cortes in Mexico, was even more eager than the priests to bring the Indian flock into the fold. The usual treatment of the natives by Coutinho and his followers was bound to bring the usual results. The Indians broke into revolt, Most of the territory now comprised in the State of Bahia was at that time inhabited by a tribe of Indians called Tupinambas, } a fierce and war-like tribe. They spread at one time over nearly all the coastal districts of Brazil. Their language was nearly allied to Guarani, as spoken by the Paraguayans to-day.{ Their * «KF leer e escrever e outras boas costumes.”—Vincente Monteiro Tezoureiro del Rey Nosso senhor, in a report to Mem de Sa, Governor of Brazil, in the “ Documentos relativos a Mem de Sa,” published in the “ Annaes da Bibliotheca Nacional, do Rio de Janeiro,” vol. xxvii, p. 194. t These Indians were a branch of the great Tupi race. t Guarani and Tupi are closely allied tongues, and in general nearly all the place-names in that vast territory are in these languages. 8 LIFE AND MIRACLES OF place-names are almost identical. Anyone with a smattering of Guarani can make out most of the place- names in the province of Bahia, apart from those in Portuguese, given by the conquerors. The Tupi- nambas seem to have been fiercer and more warlike than the Guaranis of Paraguay. Above all things, they were hardy and enduring to an extraordinary degree. These qualities they have transmitted to the Sertanejos of Bahia, most of whom have a tinge of Indian blood. The Tupinambas, or, to be accurate, the Tupiniquin Indians, most probably a branch of the more well-known tribe, soon grew sick of continued work; and the very probable injustices they had to suffer at the hands of Coutinho and his colonists, especially, we may suppose, the forced introduction of “ood customs,” always so disagreeable both to the Indian and the white man alike, drove them into revolt. They carried on for six or seven years a long- drawn-out warfare with the intruders on their lands. This warfare had all the well-known characteristics of colonial wars. The Indians attacked by night, and burned the sugar factories. ‘They cut off small bodies of the Portuguese, whom they surprised. No doubt, now and then, they massacred the settlers; at any rate, they made the colony untenable. Coutinho had to Early in the history of Brazil, and perhaps even before the conquest, Tupi became the general means of communication. It is now much mixed with Portuguese—for instance, as to numerals, for the Tupis only counted up to five, It is “ A Lingoa Geral” (the General Language), and it is supposed was so used by the varying tribes from remote ages. It runs from the southern part of the Orinoco to Paraguay and the Argentine province of Corrientes. ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO 9 re-embark with all his men, taking with him Correa as interpreter. Driven ashore by a violent gale, not far from the entrance to the harbour of Bahia, they were attacked, slaughtered and eaten, for the tribe into whose hands they fell were cannibals. Correa- Caramart escaped, owing to his knowledge of the Indian tongue. Eventually, by way of matrimony, often continued and well thought out, we may suppose, as regards the rank and circumstances of his brides’ families, he became a prince. His offspring, the Jesuit Vascon- cellos,* who wrote his life, informs us, were numerous, and it is said that many families of Bahia still trace their ancestry to the “ man with the gun.” Caramaru—Correa’s head wife, the daughter of an Indian chief, baptised'as Donna Catharina—sleeps in the suburb of Victoria, in the Church of Our Lady of Grace. She accompanied her husband to Europe, where he must have been as much at sea after so many years of Indian life as she was herself. Her baptism | took place in Paris. At it she relinquished her Indian name of Paraguassu, and took that of the Queen of France. This Indian lady, worthy to be placed beside Pocahontas in the roll of fame, has the following epitaph upon her tomb: “ This is the sepulchre+ of Donna Catharina Alvarez, Lady of this Captaincy of * This author did not write till one hundred and fifty years after Caramarti’s death, but I see no reason to doubt his word or his facts. + “Sepultura de Dona Catharina Alvarez, Senhora desta Capitania da Bahia, a qual ella, a seu marido Diogo Alvarez Correa, natural de Vianna, deram uos Senhores Reys de Portugal, fez, e deu esta Capella ao Patriarca St. Bento, Anno de 1582.”’ 10 LIFE AND MIRACLES OF Bahia, which she and her husband, Diogo Alvarez Correa, a native of Vianna, gave to the Kings of Por- tugal, and built and gave this chapel to the Patriarch St. Bento, in the year 1582.” None of Correa’s other wives left epitaphs. He himself lived to a ripe old age, and in the year 1549 he welcomed Thome de Sousa, the new Captain- General, and lodged him and _ his followers in his village, whilst a new settlement, now the City of Bahia, was being built. Donna Catharina’s Indian name, Paraguassu, is that of the river near which she was born. Her husband’s birthplace is a delightful little town in Portugal, in the province of the Minho, not very far from Spain. It stands, the houses clustering round the beautiful, flamboyant Igreja Matriz, a mine of old-world and arcaded streets, all paved with cobble stones. The River Lima, which the Roman soldiers took for Lethe, washes its walls.* Although Correa had drunk its waters in his childhood, he found those of the Paraguassi more potent, and laid his bones far from the river of his youth. Diogo Correa-Caramart and Paraguasst-Catharina were thus the originators of the race that was to have so large a share in the destiny, not only of Bahia, but of all Brazil. The Indians that the Portuguese found living upon the land were no less hardy and warlike than themselves. * Lucius Junius Brutus had to plunge into it, carrying his standard, to induce his soldiers to cross it. “The poet Diogo Bernardes says : “ Junto do Lima, claro e fresco rio Que Lethe se chamou antiguamente.” ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO II The first cross—z.e., the cross between the white and Indian—is known throughout Brazil as a “ Mestigo,” —ie., a half-breed. The introduction of the negro brought another cross and opened the way to a be- wildering number of half and quarter breeds between the different races of Indians, negroes, and the whites. These in Brazil go under many names, not very easy to keep apart and to distinguish by the foreigner. Though the colours blend into one another, the in- finite variety of gradations tends to bring about one or two separate types. As a general rule, it may be said that the Mulatto, the cross between the negro and the white, presents a typt of man, strong, bulky, and robust, but indolent and unprogressive, with a strong tendency to religious fervour. This type is generally to be found in the coast districts and rarely penetrates to the Sertao. The Mamaluco, called also Curiboca, is the half- breed between the white and Indian. Lastly, the Cafuz is the result of interbreeding between the negro and the Indian, generally the Indian of the Tupi race. The names of Curiboca and Mamaluco are of Indian origin, and are derived from Tupi words: in the first instance, ‘“‘ Curiboc ” (7.e., proceeding from the white), and in the second, “ Mamaluco,” from “mama” to mix and “rucca” to draw. All these strange names are further complicated by the term “*Caboclo,” generally used of Indians who have attained to some degree of civilisation, but often merely to designate a rustic, country fellow. All these three divisions have bred and interbred, 12 LIFE AND MIRACLES OF and keep on doing so; but in the long run the white blood generally prevails. ‘The Mamaluco and Cafuz are seldom seen upon the coast, and it is from their ranks that the interior has been chiefly populated. Just as the Mulatto usually is gay and temperamental, so is the Curiboca almost always taciturn, fanatical in his religious beliefs, steadfast in all his doings, a cruel enemy, and an equally stanch friend. Though not so powerful in a single effort as the Mulatto, he is incredibly enduring of all kinds of hard- ships. His frame is light and active, his beard sparse, his speech slow and measured, and he is not without traces of ferocity, even of cruelty in his composition, inherited with his Indian blood. The Cafuz, known in the Spanish republics as the Zambo, is the lowest of the three types. Not lacking in physical strength or energy, his mental outlook is not infrequently backward and savage, and his features often squat and simian-looking. Roughly, it may be said that all three types afford a better field for the religious enthusiast or agitator to work upon than any to be met with throughout America. The agitation or enthusiasm, however, never exceeds the limits of the Catholic Church, and all the jarring sects, so common in the United States, are quite unknown in any portion of Brazil. Such movements as have arisen in Brazil—and they have been extremely numerous—have always been what one may style revolutions of the interior grace, to use a theological term, rather than of forms of Church government or of the right of individual interpretation of the Scriptures, such as have generally given rise to ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO 13 the myriad sects amongst the English and Americans. As the repeated crossings and intercrossings of the three races have produced a type of man, neither all Indian nor all white, but with a certain strain of negro blood who has become the inhabitant of the Sertoes,* slight, active, olive-coloured, and with abundant hair and scanty beard, so have they- formed a type of mind highly receptive of religious mania. Towards the production of this physical and moral type, undoubtedly the strange nature of the country, known as the Sertdo, has powerfully contributed, as also has the isolation of their lives. From the earliest colonial times the crown of Portugal neglected the Sertao because its only industry was cattle-breeding, and this did not afford in those days a good field for taxa- tion, which chiefly fell upon the gold mines of Goyaz. This circumstance, although in some respects it probably contributed to the increase of cattle-breeding, still further shut off the inhabitants from communion with the outer world. “To-day,” as Jodo Ribeira says in his “ History of Brazil,” “‘the Sertanejo presents a type finer and purer than the dweller on the coast, where the race is so much mixed with the negro blood. “