While these reminiscences of our life in Santos and Guaruja in 1895 and '96 are uppermost, a figure comes to my mind which deserves your knowledge. It was still painfully near the horrible epoch of yellow fever developed by dredging for the new quays. That was why we all slept at Guaruja, the Barra, Sao Vicente, or Sao Paulo, even though daily coffee, banking or navigation business must be prosecuted in Santos. Such living was and is expensive, very.
At this time the United States saw fit to pay her consul in Santos $1,600 a year, since raised to $2,700, without allowance for office rent and expenses. The port cleared eight to ten millions of dollars' worth of coffee per annum for the United States, and a large import business was opening up. The barest existence at Guaruja, or other healthful suburbs, for a single man, with daily transportation to Santos, cost $1,500 in gold. But one man could be found to try the service of our government for this State, and he was an Alabama negro. He was presumably an immune from yellow fever. At any rate, his income necessitated his sleeping in his office in Santos, and when even such undignified economies left him short of funds, he borrowed of the American merchants. A U.S. cruiser anchored off shore. The U.S. Consul and American citizens were invited on board. Tide and conditions made it necessary for the "tars" to carry the guests ashore on their backs through water about waist deep. The lieutenant in charge prophesied too sure an accident to do other than advise the consul to wade ashore on his own feet.
This black man did the routine work of the office, earned more than he received, and left in debt. Merchants, as consular agents, have filled emergencies for the government. The lack of a living salary for a good man as consul in a difficult but important port is the point I wish to make clear.
The British government rates this as a first-class consulate; salary, 1,500, nearly seventy-five hundred dollars. Offices for him in both Santos and Sao Paulo are maintained at government expense. Each year here counts for two in his required term of service, and at the end of the service his pension is based on the salary of the port. Of course he has been trained to the consular service.
The British Consul when we were in Guaruja had just come from ten years' service in Mediterranean ports, a gentleman of intelligence, elegance, refinement and courtesy. His regalia always adjusted to a nicety to the diplomatic requirements of the occasion, be it a wedding ceremony, a Queen's birthday dinner, a reception or a funeral, provoked smiles from the Americans. Even the flower in his buttonhole artistically harmonized or contrasted with the shade of velvet of his lapels and cuffs.
During his first year the worst of "the fever" was in the shipping. Sailors from British ships came to his office in all stages of it. With his own hands he steadied the tottering sick ones, sent them to the hospital, and knew of his own knowledge that they were being taken care of. When they died he collected their pay from the ship-masters and saw that their money and effects reached their relatives at home. He received while we were there a letter of thanks from an American mother, whose boy, a sailor on an English ship, had died in Santos. He had collected his pay and sent home his kit. The mother sent him money to erect a stone over her son's grave.
His systematic exercises were a daily swim in the ocean, followed by a three-mile walk on the beach in the early morning, and two miles more when the business day was done, thus maintaining his best health and vigor in tropical conditions.
The engineer and purser of a British Royal Mail steamer came out to Guaruja while their ship lay in port. Neither could swim, but both went for baths in the sea. The current caught one who was drowning, and the consul rescued him in a seething surf after a struggle to the point of exhaustion. Reaching the shore, he discovered the other, a very heavy man, was being carried rapidly out to sea. He swam after him, but found him dead from sudden apoplexy, and brought his body ashore. He received a medal from the Royal Humane Society of England for his action.
These were contemporary consuls at Santos and for the great and rich State of Sao Paulo.
The American Manufacturers' Excursion to Brazil and the Argentine took place that year for the purpose of promoting trade. Governments fêted them. Papers and magazines chronicled their movements. Only the very sad death of one of their number prevented their completing their plan of coming to the important port of Santos and being received by the representative from Alabama.
To the most of the American merchants their consul was "that —— nigger." To the British Consul he was always the representative of the U. S., and an individual in a trying and poverty-stricken position, and treated with corresponding courtesy and sympathy.
En route to Brazil we saw posted in the Oxford, England, post-office, a notice warning all emigrants against going to Brazil until they had consulted the Home Office.
A few months later we saw a steamer crowded with emigrants from Canada enter the Santos harbor. The State of Sao Paulo had sent out a statement of the need of agriculturalists. Misunderstanding of needs and conditions had brought about five hundred poor Canadians to this "Land of Warmth and Sunshine," knowing nothing of agriculture, half-skilled in some trades, or well-skilled in trades useless in Brazil. The State fed them in barracks for a while, tried them on interior plantations, returned them to the barracks, tried to obtain other employment, but mostly to no avail. They sickened. Their feet festered with jiggers. They could not speak Portuguese. They were helpless. The British Consul had to send them home by twos, threes, tens, and scores, on tramp steamers, sailing-vessels—any way that they could work their passage or that he could secure the money to pay the passage of the women and children.
A letter from an American in Sao Paulo, dated July 6th, 1900, says:
"What does our government mean by sending out an Italian Priest as Consul to Santos? If he were only a priest who had practically withdrawn from active functions, it would not be so bad; but this one makes it his first duty to visit the newspapers and declare that he will not allow the duties of the consulate to interfere with his higher ecclesiastical functions, and, as proof of this, he left the duties of the office yesterday and came up to say a 30th day Mass for the soul of a person connected with the Diario Popular, and had it advertised far and near."
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