The Last Great Gold Rush

by Leighton Gage

It's called Serra Pelada.

As a generator of wealth, it can’t compare with South Africa's Witwatersrand.

Ferreira's Camp, (shown above, in a photo from 1886) became the site of modern Johannesburg, and the source of 40% of all the gold ever mined from the earth.

And it isn’t as famous as the discoveries that brought the “forty-niners” to California…

…or the frenzy, in 1897, that provoked a stampede along the Chilcoot Trail into the Yukon River valley.

But it was a great gold rush. And, to date, it is still the last.


Serra Pelada (the name, in Portuguese, means “bald mountain”) is in the Brazilian State of Pará.

And it was there, in January of 1979, that a child found a 6 gram nugget of gold on the property of a farmer named Genésio da Silva.


Within five weeks, 22,000 people had descended on the region.

Pretty impressive, considering the fact that da Silva’s farm was in a rainforest, some 430 KM south of the mouth of the Amazon River, and that the only way to get there was by plane or on foot.

Earth-moving equipment couldn’t be brought-in, because there was no road. The same applied to construction materials. 

Everything had to be done by hand.

The extraction of the gold; the building of a makeshift town; everything.

The finds multiplied.

One was a nugget of 6.8 kilograms (15 pounds). And, when word about that leaked out, the influx of miners doubled. And then doubled again.


In the end, they numbered more than 110,000.


Fights broke out.

The government stepped in and tried to impose some order.

Each miner was entitled to file a claim for a two by three meter plot (6.6 feet by 9.8 feet).

Syndicates were formed, with several men working each plot.

By May, there were 4,000 such claims.

The government banned women and alcohol at the actual site. Causing the nearest settlement, until then an isolated village, to morph into a center of “stores and whores”, where thousands of underage girls worked for flakes of gold, and 60 to 80 murders occurred each month.

Half a billion dollars worth of gold was extracted within the course of the next five years.

But then it ran out.

Today, the 300 feet-deep pit, once the largest open-air gold mine in the world, is a polluted lake.

And Serra Pelada has become a community of no more than 8,000 people.

Most have no other place to go, or cannot afford to leave.

But there are some who linger-on, still hoping to make their fortune.

In a out-of-the-way place one of its residents now describes as “a hospital for people who suffer from gold fever”.

Righteous Among the Nations – Luis Martins de Souza Dantas

by Leighton Gage

This is Getúlio Vargas, the dictator of Brazil between 1930 and 1945.

And this is Luis Martins de Souza Dantas, Brazil’s wartime ambassador to France. Souza Dantas was already serving in Paris when Vargas came to power.

And he was still there in May of 1940, when Hitler invaded the country.

In July of that year, the French government, under the new leadership of Marshall Petain, moved to Vichy.

Souza Dantas moved with it, and it was there, in March of 1943, that the Nazis broke into his office and arrested him.

But, in the intervening, 34 months, Souza Dantas, challenging two dictators at once, was able to save an estimated 800 people from extermination.

Here’s the story:

Vargas’s dictatorship, although nowhere near as brutal as that of Hitler’s, had a strict immigration policy. Diplomats had instructions not to issue visas to “undesirables”. And those “undesirables”, it was specifically stated, included Jews, Communists and Homosexuals.

Souza Dantas issued visas to them anyway.

And he instructed the Brazilian consuls in Cadiz, Casablanca, Paris, Marseilles and Lyon, all of whom reported to him, to do likewise.

When Jews started showing up in Brazilian ports in unprecedented numbers, Souza Dantas was severely reprimanded. He ignored the reprimand and continued to issue the visas.

But he began issuing them in his own hand, so as not to bring down the wrath of the authorities on any member of his staff.

On the 12^th of December, 1940, when the flow of refugees still hadn’t stopped, he was ordered to stop issuing visas. Period. He got around that by backdating them, and he was still backdating them when the Nazis arrested him.   

I expect that, before you read this post, you’d never heard of Luis Martins de Souza Dantas.

You won’t find his name in any schoolbooks, even here in Brazil.

But there are many who owe their lives, and the lives of their offspring, to his courageous actions.

His reward? After the war, he was made to resign for insubordination.

On a personal note, Souza Dantas was the great uncle of Elisa Dormoy, my wife’s closest friend.

If he had lived long enough, I would have had the opportunity to shake his hand.

And one of the frustrations of my life is that he died before I got the chance to do it.

The Serra de Capivara

by Leighton Gage

This creature is a capybara, the largest rodent in the world.

The females, larger than the males, can measure up to 130 centimeters (4.3 ft)  in length and weigh as much as  65 kg (140 lb).

Capybaras are abundant throughout Brazil and have been for many thousands of years.

They’re reputed ('ve never eaten one) to be quite tasty, with a meat not unlike pork.

But this post isn’t really about capybaras,

It’s about the Parque Nacional da Serra da Capivara  (Capybara Mountain Range National Park).

The park named after the mountains, named after the capybaras that once lived there, is located in the  northeastern State of Piaui.

And it’s there, where that little green dot is located, that you will find the vestiges of the largest concentration of prehistoric small farms in all of the Americas (North, Central and South).

And a remarkable collection of rock paintings, some of which were created more than 14,000 years ago.

There are five main cultural themes.

Dance.

Sexual Practices.

Hunting.

Rituals performed around a tree.

and animals.

There is also quite a bit of entirely incomprehensible iconography, like human bodies heaped on a pyramid.

The paintings of the Serra da Capivara are neither as old, nor as beautiful as those of Lascaux:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux

or Altamira:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Altamira

But their great age makes them pretty impressive, all the same.

The Bedsheets of Maranhão

by Leighton Gage


I saw them, first, from several miles in the air.

My wife and I were on a flight from Fortaleza, on the coast of Ceará, to Belem, near the mouth of the Amazon.

It was a clear day, not a cloud in the sky, and I looked down to see this:

A desert composed of white sand dunes, strewn with flashes of emerald green and turquoise blue.

It was, and still is, a landscape vaguely reminiscent of precious stones scattered on bedsheets.

Which is why Brazilians call the region the Lençóis Maranhenses = the Bed Sheets of Maranhão (Maranhão being the Brazilian State in which the dunes are located.)

The dunes were formed, over thousands of years, by sand deposited at the mouths of rivers and carried back to the continent by winds and sea currents.

Some of those dunes are more than 40 meters (130 feet) high, and they advance as far 50 kilometers inland from a (mostly deserted) coast.

The flashes, upon closer observation, turn out to be lagoons full of water.

That’s right, water – in the middle of a desert.

Bizarre, huh?

Even more bizarre is the fact that I wouldn’t have seen so much of a drop of it if I’d made the journey six months later.

The region records an annual rainfall of 1,600mm (more than 62 inches), 300 times more than the Sahara, and the lagoons are formed during the rainy season, which is at the beginning of the year.

When they’re full, the water in them is crystal clear and miraculously full of fish, crayfish, crabs and clams.

And, then, during the dry season, they simply disappear.

The region covers a total area of more than 1,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of the American State of Rhode Island.

The best time to visit the place is from the beginning of July through the end of September.

During those months it’s sunny, but not too hot, and you can walk up and down the dunes in your bare feet.

And then take a refreshing plunge in the crystal clear water.

Unforgettable!

Flip

by Leighton Gage

Here I am, folks, standing on a street in Paraty, a little town, on the Brazilian coast, about halfway between the cites Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

Back in colonial times, Paraty was the deep water port from which much of Brazil’s gold was sent “home” to Portugal. These days, though, there’s barely enough draft in the main channel for small fishing boats and pleasure craft.  

The city fronts on a bay where the turquoise water is studded with more than three hundred islands. And, beyond it, a dense rain forest covers mountains that rise to heights of more than five thousand feet.

But, for the Brazilian literary world, Paraty has a significance that goes beyond its colonial architecture and  picture-perfect setting. Paraty is the site of the FLIP, Festa Literária Internacional deParaty, The Paraty International Literary Festival. Guest authors from the past have included Dennis Lehane, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Anthony Bourdain, Jonathan Coe, J.M. Coetzee, Amos Oz and Nadine Gordimer. And, each year, it attracts about 500 writers, 200 publishers and 13,000 enthusiastic readers.

Most of the action takes place in a huge air-conditioned tent. There’s a café on one side, a bookstore on the other and, inside, authors do their stuff by participating in a series of panels. There’s simultaneous translation into English, Portuguese, Spanish and other languages when necessary. The FLIP’s opening shows feature performers like Chico Buarque, Paulinho da Viola, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Maria Bethânia, all famous names in Brazilian Popular Music.

And then there’s the parallel event, the Flipinha (little FLIP) for kids. Books dangle from shade trees, storytellers spin tales, and writers read from their works. 

Check out the insect. No kid who saw that will forget Gregor Samsa.

Dates vary from year to year, but the FLIP is always in (Brazilian) mid-winter, July or August. In Paraty, there are plenty of cheap hotels, restaurants and bars. And, for a small fee, a fisherman is always willing to take you out to a deserted beach on one of the islands. Even at that time of the year, the water is comfortably warm.

Thinking of coming down for a visit to Brazil? Do it when you can attend the FLIP.

It’s only a three hour drive (or a four hour bus ride) from either São Paulo or Rio.

Their website: http://www.flip.org.br/

Leighton