When the first hardy Portuguese and their descendants the _mamelucos_ began, very early after the acquisition of a few strips of coast by the first captains, to penetrate the interior of the Land of the True Cross they used the rivers as highways. The settlers of São Paulo sailed their canoes on the Tieté, the “sacred river of São Paulo,” and it was a facile system of exploration because this river flows inland from the heights of the mountain barrier where it takes its rise; running north-west for four hundred miles it joins the great Paraná and thence continues southward, finding its way to the sea as part of the Rio de la Plata. The water systems of the east coast of South America are so enormous and so closely linked that it is possible, with but a few miles of portage, to traverse a river path all the way from Buenos Aires in the Argentine to Pará in North Brazil, a journey of some four thousand miles. What the Tieté was to the pioneer Paulistas, the slave-hunting indomitable _bandeirantes_, the São Francisco was to the early colonists of Bahia, no less energetic, fearless and predatory. This noble river rises in the mountains of Minas Geraes, flowing north and eventually turning east towards the sea and forming the renowned Paulo Affonso Falls. When the mineral riches of the “General Mines” were discovered this river became a busy highway of travel, the Bahianos flocking to the regions of gold and precious stones in such numbers that the coast settlement was almost deserted. It was during this period of gold fever that two of the very few good roads in Brazil were constructed: one ran between Rio de Janeiro and the first capital of Minas, the mining town of Ouro Preto (“Black Gold”), and along it caravans travelled weekly, bringing out ore and hides and taking in slaves and merchandise. Villages which sprang up along the line of this old highway still exist although the road itself has long fallen out of repair, and one, Juiz da Fora, has grown into an important well-built town, the centre of a mining and agricultural section now served by a railroad. The other road which owed its construction to the exciting tales from the gold camps ran between São Paulo city and the mines; its existence was limited by the days of prosperity of the gold-seekers, and when the rich deposits of alluvial gold were exhausted and the _batea_ had perforce to be exchanged for the spade, the road was abandoned. The ill luck which attended the pitched battles of the Paulistas with other claimants to the General Mines caused the withdrawal of many fortune seekers back to the plantations of S. Paulo and hastened the decay of the highway.