Excerpt from Exploring and Travelling Three Thousand Miles Through Brazil, Vol. 1 of 2: From Rio De Janeiro to Maranhāo; With an Appendix Containing Statistical and Observations on Climate, Railways, Central, Sugar Factories, Mining, Commerce, and Finance; The Past, Present, and Future, and Physical, Geography of Brazil

I have no hesitation whatever in now submitting this work, as the scenes and incidents described are just as applicable to the present time as if the journey had been finished last year, for in the distant interior the march of progress is so Slow that practically no difference is perceptible in the course Ofa dozen years. Indeed, wherever I intersected or followed the routes Of Mr. Gardner or of Captain Burton, I found no noticeable change in the various localities as described by these authors, from what existed on my visit so many years after them. My purpose throughout the book has been to convey an unbiassed delineation of the subjects I have dealt with; to write neither as an optimist nor as a pessimist and to relate truthfully and without exaggeration, not a specialist's researches and dis coveries, but an engineer's matter-of-fact experiences amidst the healthy highlands of Minas Geraes, the pestiferous swamps of the valley of the Rio S50 Francisco, the bright, breezy uplands of Goyaz, on the long reaches of the Rio Tocantins on the sandy highlands of Maranhfio, and amidst the grandly beautiful but torturing-insect-infested forests of the Rio Grajahu a life passed in farms, in huts, under canvas, or with only the bright star-lit skies for a roof; riding, or tramping footsore under a burning sun boating, canoeing, or rafting on many waters; and finally meeting good, bad, and in different natives, from nature's gentlemen under the roughest guise to the most fearful of scoundrels - men, some bright and energetic, others most pitiably indolent and steeped in the dregs of the lowest moral degradation.

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