The first official, deliberate importation of colonists of blood foreign to Brazil or Portugal began in 1817, when Dom João brought in Swiss settlers. Agents of the Brazilian Government recruited no less than five thousand in Bern, although owing to delays and accidents only about two thousand sailed from Amsterdam and Rotterdam: landing on a hot coastal belt after a trying voyage, fever took the mountaineers, and but a sparse seventeen hundred reached the foot of the Serra do Mar. Climbing to the pretty nook where the town of their founding, Nova Friburgo, stands today in a shelter of green mountains, sickness still followed them, and only the hardiest or most resistant clung to the colony, survived and left their name to another generation. Many dispersed to other localities. Nova Friburgo, now reached by the Leopoldina railway, and a thriving city, fresh, flowery, producer of cereals and peaches, owns few Swiss inhabitants today. A second batch of immigrants, three hundred and forty-two Germans, filled some gaps in the ranks: their readiness for labour may have been heightened by memories of the difficulties of transit to Europe, for the journey had taken one hundred and eighty days in a sailing-ship. Germany at this period had not begun the industrial expansion which later kept all her people at home; economic conditions were severe on the ambitious worker, laws and social customs were irksome, and enterprising men looked across the seas for free lands. Germany became for about twenty-five years the very best recruiting ground for Brazil.