The various lines carrying the commerce of the United States with South America may be said to have furnished a fairly adequate serv ice, and in the main their ships were ready to carry all the cargo that offered. There has been considerable agitation in recent years for the establishment of American steamship lines to carry freight and passenger traffic between the United States and Latin America, but this has arisen from a desire for many advantages de rived from a national service rather than from a conspicuous inadequacy of cargo space. Nev ertheless there is little question that American owned vessels would do much to assist in the upbuilding of United States trade with Latin America. American lines could expand their service with the increasing demands from American shippers, and could adopt policies that would directly encourage a steady trade in crease. A faster schedule with more frequent sailings of passenger vessels to Brazil and the river Plata would help to bring shipping com munications from New York to a par with those from Liverpool, Hamburg and Genoa. A constant community of interest between Amer ican industries and the companies which trans ported their products to Latin America would work for as great an expansion of both trade and shipping as could •easonably be expected under normal conditions of competition. It is probable that with the growth of interest in foreign trade in the United States the estab lishment of American-owned lines to all parts of Latin America will be a question of only a short time.
The time now required for the voyage from New York to Buenos Aires is 24 or 25 days, to Rio de Janeiro 17 days, to Colon 7 days, to Cartagena 8 or 9 days, to La Guaira 8 to 10 clan, to Guayaquil, Ecuador, 12 to 14 days, to Callao, Peru, about 15-days and to Valparaiso, Chile, about 22 days. The West Coast and the Merchants lines offer through service to the west coast, and the United Fruit Company and the Panama Railroad and Steamship lines con nect with the boats of the Peruvian and Chilean lines and the Pacific Steam Navigation Com pany. Vessels plying to east coast ports from New York make no stops in the West Indies, as a rule, except at Barbados, and occasionally Trinidad, and travelers in Venezuela or Coloin bia who wish to visit Brazil and Argentina often find it more desirable to return to New York than to wait for connections. Pernam buco is the first port of call for the regular liners on the way down the east coast, except those of the Lloyd Bratileiro, and Path and neighboring ports are reached from Pernam buco by coasting vessels.
River Transportation.— Transportation by river in South America has had the importance which it always has in a new and unexplored continent, and it will continue to be perhaps the chief factor in the development of the in terior regions, particularly the Amazon Valley, for an indefinite time to come. Where rail ways are built they form of course the prin cipal means of carrying traffic, and a steady ex pansion in railway construction is to be ex pected. But such construction is attended with great difficulties in the vast tropical regions of the northern and central sections as well as in the mountainous regions of the west coast, and the cost is very heavy. The rivers will, there
fore, remain the recognized outlets for these tropical regions until the growth of population makes it feasible and desirable to provide what is now dense forest land with networks of rail ways.
There are four great river systems in South America on which vessels ranging in size from the small canoe of the Indian to the great ocean' liners carry manufactured goods to the interior and bring out rubber, hides and a dozen other tropical products. These are the systems of the Amazon, the river Plata, the Orinoco and the Magdalena. So extensive are these systems that with a comparatively few miles portage one can go by boat except for rapids from Buenos Aires to the mouth of the Orinoco. The great Amazon, of course, leads in the extent of navigable waterways and ocean liners go regularly as far as Maria& and even Iquitos, almost to the boundary of Ecua dor. The Parana and its tributaries, the Para guay and the Pilcomayo, stretch far into the heart of the continent and afford an outlet for the interior plains of Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. In the north the Orinoco is as yet little utilized because the country it serves is but thinly settled, but the grassy plains through which it flows will support millions more cattle than they do, and until railways are built to the coast their only outlet will be by way of the river. In Colombia the Magdalena forms the only highway by which freight and passengers move from the interior of the coun try to the Atlantic Coast and vice-versa.
Navigation on the Amazon, in many respects the most remarkable river highway in the world, is carried on by ocean liners, particularly the boats of the Booth Line and the Lloyd Brazil eiro, by a number of river companies and by a host of larger or smaller vessels not grouped into companies. The principal river company is the Companhia Navegacio do Amazonas, a Brazilian company, which owns some 50 or 60 vessels. The principal port is that of Manads, about 1,000 miles from Para, on the Rio Negro near the place where it empties into the Ama zon. On the Madeira there is continuous navi gation to the beginning of the rapids at Santo Antonio, and beyond these series of rapids, which are spanned by the Madeira-Mamore Railway, boats of light draft can run almost to the foot of the mountains. On the Amazon itself the line of navigable water for large draft boats passes the frontier of Peru and continues on to Iquitos, and much farther for those of smaller size. Another highly import ant river in Brazilian transportation is the Sao Francisco, which rises in the state of Minas Geraes and flows north for more than a thou sand miles before turning east and south to the Atlantic. Rapids and falls prohibit through navigation, but there is a stretch of about 800 miles between Pirapora and Sobradinho over which boats of considerable size can operate.