On This Coast The Currents Of The Sea Tend
To Throw Up In Front Of The Land, Long Spits And Bars Of
Loose Sand, And On One Of These, Part Of The Town Of Pernambuco
Stands.
In former times a long spit of this nature
seems to have become consolidated by the percolation of
calcareous
Matter, and afterwards to have been gradually
upheaved; the outer and loose parts during this process having
been worn away by the action of the sea, and the solid
nucleus left as we now see it. Although night and day the
waves of the open Atlantic, turbid with sediment, are
driven against the steep outside edges of this wall of stone,
yet the oldest pilots know of no tradition of any change in its
appearance. This durability is much the most curious fact
in its history: it is due to a tough layer, a few inches thick,
of calcareous matter, wholly formed by the successive
growth and death of the small shells of Serpulae, together
with some few barnacles and nulliporae. These nulliporae,
which are hard, very simply-organized sea-plants, play an
analogous and important part in protecting the upper surfaces
of coral-reefs, behind and within the breakers, where
the true corals, during the outward growth of the mass,
become killed by exposure to the sun and air. These
insignificant organic beings, especially the Serpulae, have done
good service to the people of Pernambuco; for without their
protective aid the bar of sandstone would inevitably have
been long ago worn away and without the bar, there would
have been no harbour.
On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil.
I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To
this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful
vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco,
I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but
suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew
that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I
suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I
was told that this was the case in another instance. Near
Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept
screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have
stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily
and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to
break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little
boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip
(before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having
handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his
father tremble at a mere glance from his master's eye.
These latter cruelties were witnessed by me in a Spanish
colony, in which it has always been said, that slaves are
better treated than by the Portuguese, English, or other
European nations. I have seen at Rio de Janeiro a powerful
negro afraid to ward off a blow directed, as he thought, at his
face.
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