Journal of a Voyage to Brazil: And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823Callcott, Maria, Lady
History
Journal of a Voyage to Brazil: And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823
Callcott, Maria, Lady
Brazil -- Description and travel
After dinner I walked about a little in the village of the negroes.
There are, I believe, about fifteen hundred on the estate, the greater
part of whom belong to the outlying farms or feitorias, of which there
are, I believe, three; Bom Jardin, Piperi, and Serra: these yield
coffee, feijoă, and maize. The immediate neighbourhood of Santa Cruz is
appropriated to the rearing of cattle, of which there are this year
about four thousand head; and a good deal of pasture land is annually
let. The negroes of Santa Cruz are not fed and clothed by the Emperor,
but they have their little portions of land; and they have half of
Friday, all Saturday and Sunday, and every holiday, to labour for
themselves; so that they at most work for their master four days, in
return for their house and land; and some even of the external marks of
slavery are removed, as the families feed and clothe themselves without
the master's interference. The Emperor has appropriated great part of a
very commodious building, erected by his father for the royal stud, to
the purpose of an hospital. I visited it, and found a white surgeon and
black assistant; decent beds, and well-ventilated apartments: the
kitchen was clean, and the broth, which was all I found cooked at the
time of night when I was there, good: there were about sixty patients,
most of them merely for sores in their feet, some from giggers, others a
sort of leprosy from working in damp grounds, and a few with
elephantiases; fevers are very rare; pulmonary complaints not uncommon.
Several of the inmates of the hospital were there merely from old age;
one was insane; and there was a large ward of women, with young
children: so that, on the whole, I consider the hospital as affording a
proof of the healthiness of the negroes of Santa Cruz.
_Sunday, 24th_, presented a very respectable congregation on its way to
the chapel of Santa Cruz. There were all the officers belonging to the
palace, with their wives and families; also the shopkeepers of the
village and neighbourhood, besides a good many of the negro people; all
of them, I think, better dressed than persons of the same class
elsewhere in this part of Brazil.
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