312 TO THE AMAZON AND HOME [chap, x 



house is built where no house has ever stood before. 

 Such a man, the real pioneer, must have no strong 

 desire for social life and no need, probably no know- 

 ledge, of any luxury, or of any comfort save of the 

 most elementary kind. The pioneer who is always 

 longing for the comfort and luxury of civUization, and 

 especially of great cities, is no real pioneer at all. 

 These settlers whom we met were contented to live in 

 the wilderness. They had found the climate healthy 

 and the soil fruitful ; a visit to a city was a very rare 

 event, nor was there any overwhelming desire for it. 



In short, these men, and those like them everywhere 

 on the frontier between civihzation and savagery in 

 Brazil, are now playing the part played by our back- 

 woodsmen when over a century and a quarter ago they 

 began the conquest of the great basin of the Mississippi ; 

 the part played by the Boer farmers for over a century 

 in South Africa, and by the Canadians when less than 

 half a century ago they began to take possession of their 

 North- West. Every now and then someone says that the 

 " last frontier " is now to be found in Canada or Africa, 

 and that it has almost vanished. On a far larger scale 

 this frontier is to be found in Brazil — a country as big 

 as Europe or the United States — and decades will pass 

 before it vanishes. The first settlers came to Brazil 

 a century before the first settlers came to the United 

 States and Canada. For three hundred years progress 

 was very slow — Portuguese colonial government at 

 that time was almost as bad as Spanish. For the last 

 half-century and over there has been a steady increase 

 in the rapidity of the rate of development ; and this 

 increase bids fair to be constantly more rapid in the 

 future. 



The Paolistas, hunting for lands, slaves, and mines. 



