SECTION IV: PERNAMBUCO COTTON 303 



of thread and pieces of cloth) were in Brazil employed as money. 

 In 1560, Duarte Albuquerque Coelho became heir to the Captaincy of 

 Pernambuco, and sailed from Lisbon to take possession. He appointed 

 his brother Jorge chief of the military forces. In 1565 Jorge returned 

 from Olinda, Pernambuco, for Europe in a ship that experienced such 

 rough weather that they had to throw overboard the artillery and First 

 many boxes of sugar and ' bales of cotton.' Thus the Portuguese expor s ' 

 must have organised the foreign trade of Pernambuco very efficiently 

 and quickly, and the lost cargo was very possibly the first attempt at 

 exporting cotton from Brazil. Lopez Vaz, in 1586, visited Fernam- 

 buck (as he calls it), and speaks of the town as containing 3,000 

 houses, 70 sugar factories, great stores of Brazil wood, and abundance 

 of cotton. Hakluyt (' Voy.' &c., 1810, iv., p. 207) tells us that Mr. 

 James Lancaster in 1594, after the defeat of Fernambuck, carried off 

 several ships with cargo, among which was cotton. The first regular Eegular 

 exports of cotton from Brazil took place a century later (cf. Cezar 

 Augusto Marques, ' Diet, of Maranhao,' p. 13). But we may judge of 

 the rapid change effected on Native systems when we read that in 

 1784 a complaint was made to the King of Portugal, by Portuguese 

 merchants, against the Brazilian manufacturers. These were, it Brazilian 

 would seem, through the popularity of the goods they turned out, ^^ reg 

 seriously obstructing ,the imports. Less than a century still later 

 (1809-15), Koster (' Trav.,' I c., 1816, 366) speaking of the very area 

 of Pernambuco, observes : ' The cotton plantations are yearly reced- 

 ing further into the interior, wherever the Sertam plains do not 

 prevent this recession. The plantations of this description, which 

 were formerly established nearer to the coast, are now employed in the 

 rearing of other plants.' Similarly in Peru cotton cultivation and Manu- 

 manufacture had attained a position of importance prior to the p eru 

 invasion of the Spanish. The subsequent histories of both these 

 countries may be said to have marked a retrogression rather than 

 a progression, in the cotton industries, and it is thus probable that 

 their present backward positions as cotton-growing countries is 

 more the result of external than internal disabilities. 



Lerius (I.e.), writing of Brazil in 1557, says: 'The Barbarian Bombasin 

 women are not unskilful in gathering and spinning that Bombasin 

 cotton, for of it they make their beds.' Does the word ' gathering ' 

 denote that it was a wild plant, the wool of which the women col- 

 lected ? But whether the species grown in ancient times was exclu- 

 sively, or largely, G. brasiliense, there can be no doubt, as already 



