10. TRANSPORTATION AND COM MUNICATION. Brazilian railways had a total length of 16,294 miles open to traffic on 1 Jan. 1916. The government owns and administers 2,929 miles; 5,716 miles were pri vately leased; 3,447 miles held by government concessions, granted to various enterprises; and 3,897 miles operated by private corporations under state concessions in 1914. The design of the entire system is such that, when completed, the Brazilian lines will connect with the very important railway system of Argentina and those of Paraguay and Uruguay.
Railway construction in Brazil dates back to 1854 when a line nine miles long connecting Porto do Maui with Ruiz do Serra was com pleted. But it was not until four years later that the first government road was opened for traffic. Since then the government has taken an active part in the railway construction of the republic. The railways of Brazil are al most all in the states bordering on the coast or the great rivers; and, for the size of the country and the extent of its population, they form an inadequate means of transportation. The vast interior stretches of the country suffer most in this respect, many of them having no railway communication whatever except an oc casional short, privately owned line used gener ally for industrial purposes. There was, in 1917, through railway connection from Rio de Janeiro to Montevideo in Uruguay over the Rio Grande do Sul and the Rio de Janeiro systems. These two systems which have many branch lines, extensive though they are, cover but a small part of the southern Atlantic coast country of Brazil. Another railway system with Bahia for its headquarters supplies trans portation facilities northward to Cape Saint Roque, with Pernambuco as the most import ant northern terminus. On the northern coast some 300 miles of railway connect the port town of Ceara with Milagres, almost due south ward in the mountains. Still further north Para is connected with Braganca on the sea coast by rail. All these systems, except the two first mentioned, are as yet unconnected with one another. And even if they were they would form but a fringe ornamenting, at inter vals, the skirt of Brazil where it touches the Atlantic. Over a stretch of 2,500 miles due east and west, and for a distance of almost 2,000 due north and south through the heart of great central Brazil, not a railway exists. It is a land rich in possibilities which only transportation can help to realize; for it is capable of growing almost every known prod uce of tropic, sub-tropic and temperate lands.
The Brazil Railways Company was reor ganized in Paris in August 1917 on a plan providing for the extension of all bond issues to the uniform date of 1969; the placing of all interests upon an income basis; a uniform system of sinking-fund payments beginning in 1922 for all series of bond issues; the dis charge in full of all floating debt to secured creditors through new secured debentures sub ordinate to the other issues; and the raising of new capital of 80,000,000 francs by the issue of 25-year 6 per cent prior lien bonds. The
first issue, 21,000,000 francs, was taken by the French banks.
The chief Atlantic ports of Brazil are: Rio de Janeiro, Santos, Pernambuco, Bahia, Puerto Alegre, Rio Grande, Ceara and Para nagua the most important Amazonian ports being 'Mangos (on the Rio Negro near its con fluence with the great river) and Para. At these ports are registered many transatlantic lines — about 50 in all; and the merchant navy of Brazil which consisted in 1916 of 377 steamers of 290,637 tons and 290 sailing vessels of 60,728 tons net, all of which, together with all coasting and river vessels, must by law be Brazilian. This has been added to materially since, for the Brazilian government undertook, when German and other European shipping failed her, to fill the field with native vessels. The Brazilian Lloyd, which had long maintained a monthly service between Rio de Janeiro and New York, established a line connecting Portu guese, English and Brazilian ports. When the Brazilian government seized, in 1917, the 43 German vessels interned in Brazilian ports (a total of 221,000 tons), a part of this tonnage was added to the Lloyd Brasileiro, which thus, with the fleets of. the Commercio e Navegacio and the coast lines had early in 1917 over 375,000 tons under its direction. Since the beginning of 1915 the policy of the Brazilian government has been to build up, at all sacri fice, the merchant navy and to encourage, by liberal subventions, independent river and coast shipping. The efforts of the Brazilian government to replace shipping facilities lost through the war include the chartering of native and foreign vessels for a wide variety of destinations, including home, Latin-Ameri can, United States and European ports. The shipping service to Montevideo, Buenos Aires and New York was largely reorganized and a much more efficient and frequent service connected Rio de Janeiro, Santos, Montevideo, Bahia and Pernambuco, which had suffered greatly from lack of shipping facilities during the first two years of the European War.