cost a life for every tie that was laid. Now the Special Public Health Service, organized with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, in the good neighbor days of World War II, had turnedthe valley into a health resort, so the story went. I arranged to go see.
It was a rough trip. Almost anywhere else in the world the trip might have seemed uncomfortably rough, but the good humor of my companions and the general tendency to take things as they came, turned it into a pleasant outing.
In those days no matter where you were going from Rio you arrived at Santos Dumont airport before dawn and stood around drinking coffee while the plane crews collected and prepared in their leisurely Brazilian way for the takeoff. Dr. Penido, who was at that time in charge of the Rio Doce Health Service, turned up just in time to insist on paying for my coffee. A complete stranger got ahead of me with a coin when I tried to buy a newspaper. Our first stop on the flight north was in a scorched meadow near a sunflattened little town with redtiled roofs under coconut palms. The passengers piled out on the runway to stretch their legs and clustered round an old man selling green coconuts with straws stuck in to drink the water from. By the time I’d fished some money out of my pocket to pay for my coconut, the steward had already settled for it.
Muito obrigado
. A little embarrassing, this Brazilian hospitality, but it does make a foreigner feel they are glad to have him there.
Vitória, the capital of the State of Espírito Santo and the shipping port for the Itabira ore, turned out to be on the flank of a rocky island. First thing we were all bunched up for a photograph on the terrace of a clubhouse built on the ruins of the fort which used to guard the harbor’s narrow mouth. More Public Health Service doctors and a couple of Americans who worked for the Rio Doce Railroad had met us at the airstrip. Now we were confronted with the salutations of the local newspaper editor and of a group of townspeople.
It was Sunday and the sun was bright and the bay was blue and the men wore shining white suits. Inside the clubhouse young people were dancing the samba. While his photographer was crouching and peering the newspaper editor pointed out to me some old prostrate cannon rusting on the ledge below the clubhouse terrace. In the seventeenth century, he said, the Dutch had tried to take Vitória and the defenders had stretched cables from this fort to the granite shore opposite and had sunk a Dutch man-of-war and saved the city for Brazil. It was in this war against the Dutch that Brazilian nationality first came into being. His chest puffed out and he strutted like a bantam as he turned to mug the camera.
The sun was hot and the breeze off the sea was cool. After the shutter clicked, we stood a moment looking out, over the dancing blue waves of the harbor hemmed in by hills, at the redtiled roofs of the brick and stucco town and the small freighters tied up to the wharves and the yellow bulk of the oredocks opposite. There were gulls. A few dark man-of-war birds skimmed overhead.
Was this the mouth of the Rio Doce? I asked. Good Lord no, the mouth of the Rio Doce was miles away to the north. Vitória was the port for the Rio Doce Railroad down from the mines which has to climb out of the valley over a mountain range to get to it. The Rio Doce emptied into a shallow delta and had no decent harbor at its mouth. Everybody began to explain at once that the historical impediment to development in southern and central Brazil had from colonial days been that you always had to climb a mountain range to get into the interior. The iron ore deposits up in the central part of Minas Gerais had been known and worked since the beginning of Brazil, but it was only now that large scale shipment was in sight. In the early days hostile Indians blocked the use of the waterlevel route up the Rio Doce into the mining country. Then it had been malaria … “But