Looking up the coast from Victoria there is observable a gap between that pretty port and the cacao centre, Bahia, as regards railroad connections parallel to the sea coast. The greatest networks of lines have ceased in Espirito Santo, and above this region there is only one linking series of lines, the system of the Great Western of Brazil, serving the whole of the great north-east promontory of Brazil. The lines of Bahia do not form a coherent system, important as they are as regards local needs. Below the port of Bahia (properly the city of São Salvador, but as little popularly known by that name as Rio is recognized by her official title of São Sebastião) there are two lines penetrating from coast towns inwards to cacao-producing country: the most ambitious runs from Ponta da Areia, close to the port of Caravellas, westwards across the narrow southern neck of Bahia State, into Minas Geraes to the town of Theophilo Ottoni, a distance of three hundred and seventy-six kilometers. The second penetrating line runs from the port of Ilhéos to Conquista, a distance of eighty-two kilometers. During the war and post-war booms this was a notable freight carrier and profit maker, for the cacao plantations tributary to the line have yielded unprecedentedly large crops at a time when every ounce of cocoa in the world has been called for at high prices. The isolated little Ilhéos rolled in unexpected money in 1915–16, and prospered again in 1919. Bahia’s great port farther northward stands on a peninsula at the north of a large, deeply indented, island-studded bay. There is no river delta here to assist transportation problems, and connection between the lines originating at different parts of the bay is rendered difficult by the depth of sea inlets and the marshy character of the intervening land. It is for these reasons that a line runs south from Nazareth, itself south of the bay, west from São Felix, north-westerly from Cachoeira, with the most important line of all running from Bahia city across country until junction with the legendary river S. Francisco is effected at Joazeiro: this latter line branches off at Alagoinhas (“Little Lakes”) to Aracajú, the port of the little-known State of Sergipe, and forms the only linking railroad of the series serving Bahia. The cacao crop of the State is all marketed in and shipped from Bahia city: it reaches that distributing point from the producing centres of the more southerly lands by sea, a state-owned service of small steamboats, the “Navigação Bahiana,” helping in this transportation work, besides operating on the S. Francisco river and running to and from certain productive islands off the Bahia coast. In 1915 Bahia exported 41,546 tons of cacao with an official value of 37,000 contos of reis, or about nine and a quarter million dollars, yielding in taxes to the State 6,388 contos, in addition to large sums contributed by the tobacco and coffee export. As