l fortune--as I intended to push out of the place and proceed
northward at once.

Four of my men became badly intoxicated upon our arrival. There was
another mutiny. They again claimed their pay up to date and wished to
leave me. At once they received their money. It was such a relief to me
when they went off, even for a few hours, that I was always glad to give
them the money and have a short mental rest while they kept away.
Unfortunately it was impossible to obtain a single extra man in
Diamantino. Labour was scarce, and the few labourers in existence were in
absolute slavery. Indeed, slavery existed--it exists to-day--in all
Central Brazil, just as it did before slavery was abolished. Only in the
old days of legal slavery it was limited to negroes; now the slaves are
negroes, mulattoes, white people, even some Europeans. I have seen with
my own eyes a German gentleman of refinement in that humble condition.

In the present condition of things the slave, in the first instance,
sells himself or is sold by his family. There were indeed few, if any, of
the labouring classes in Matto Grosso and Goyaz provinces who were free
men or women. All were owned by somebody, and if you wished to employ
them--especially to take them away from a village or a city--you had to
purchase them from their owners. That meant that if you intended to
employ a man--even for a few days--you had to disburse a purchase sum
equivalent to two or three hundred pounds sterling, sometimes more. In
the following way it was made impossible for the slaves to become free
again. Taking advantage of the poverty and vanity of those people, loans
of money were offered them in the first instance, and also luxuries in
the way of tinned food, clothing, revolvers and rifles. When once they
had accepted, and could not repay the sum or value of the articles
received, they became the property of the lender, who took good care to
increase the debt constantly by supplying cheap articles to them at
fifty times their actual cost. The _seringueiro_, or rubber collector,
had a _caderneta_, or booklet and the master a _livro maestro_, or
account book, in which often double the quantity of articles actually
received by the rubber collector were entered. The debt thus increased by
leaps and bounds, and in a short time a labourer owed his master, two,
three hundred pounds. The rubber collectors tried hard to repay the debt
in rubber, which they sold to their masters at a low