CHAPTER XIII. 



MATTO GROSSO. 



ITH the exception of a narrow central zone, the vast region of 

 Matto Grosso, that is, the " Great Forest," nearly five times the 

 size of the British Isles, is a mere wilderness with undefined 

 limits, and, if not actually unknown, at least abandoned to the 

 aborig-ines and wild beasts. With the rest of Brazil it is con- 

 nected only by the tracks of hunters, or the course of the navigable waters rising 

 within its borders. Its very name has no distinct geographical meaning, for the 

 expression is ajjplied to many distinct regions, which belong only in small measure 

 to the Amazonian selva. Most of the territory is in fact comprised in the zone 

 of uplands which form the waterparting between the great northern and southern 

 basins, and which are overgrown not with forest trees but with stunted 5crub 

 and bush. 



Another section consists of the partly dried bed of an old inland sea, whose 

 shores are thinly wooded. The whole of the civilised population is less than that 

 of a single suburb of Bio de Janeiro, and in an area of some 530,000 square 

 miles the inhabitants, settled and savage, fall considerably short of 200,000. 

 Yet no other country exceeds certain parts of the Brazilian wilderness in fertility, 

 and within its borders there is certainly ample space for a population of at least 

 100,000,000. 



HiSToiiic Survey. 



Except in the extreme south and west, Matto Gi-osso remained unvisited by 

 the Spanish conquerors, who, after establishing themselves in Peru and in the 

 Plate estuary, made no serious attempt to connect these two sections of their 

 prodigious domain, or at least limited their efforts in this direction to the explora- 

 tion of the Upper Paraguay and of the Bolivian plateaux. 



Hence the Paulist kidnappers were the first whites to penetrate into Matto 



