cient.

The capital of Goyaz--situated on the Rio Vermelho, a tributary of the
great Araguaya River--had, according to the census of 1900, a population
of some 13,475 people, but I rather doubt whether it possessed as many as
8 to 10,000 souls when I visited it. One could notice indications that
Goyaz had been in days gone by a flourishing place. There were a number
of fine churches, and a large cathedral in course of construction--but
since abandoned. Some of the buildings, too--the finest was the
prison--must have been quite handsome, but were now in a dilapidated
condition. It was really heart-breaking to see such a magnificent country
go to rack and ruin--a State naturally the richest perhaps in Brazil, yet
rendered the poorest, deeply steeped in debt, and with the heavy weight
of absurdly contracted loans from which it had no hope whatever of
recovering under present conditions. They had in the province the most
beautiful land in Brazil, but it was a land of the dead. People,
industries, trade, commerce, everything was dead. Formerly, in the time
of the Emperor and of that great patriot General Couto de Magalhaes,
Goyaz city could be reached--within a few kilometres--by steam on the
beautiful river Araguaya, which formed the western boundary of the
province, an ideal waterway navigable for 1,200 kil.--in Goyaz province
alone. In the time of the Emperor, when Brazil was a wild country, steam
navigation actually existed up the Araguaya River from Conceicao as far
as Leopoldina (the port for Goyaz city). The river was free from
obstacles of any kind, even in the rainy season. There were then three
beautiful English-built launches on that service. A fine repairing shop
had been erected at Leopoldina.

But in these days of civilization, order and progress, the steamers have
been purposely run aground and left to rot. There was actually a tree
growing through the hull of one of those launches when I last heard of
them; the machine shop was robbed of all its tools, and the machinery
destroyed and abandoned. The Presidente told me that the Provincial
Government had eventually bought the wrecks of the launches and the
machine shops for L20--and as it cost too much to leave a man in charge
everything had since been abandoned.

When I visited Goyaz there was no sign and no hope of re-establishing
steam navigation on that marvellous waterway.

The Tocantins River, which intersected the Province from Goyaz city to
its most