Brazil, the Amazons and the coast . ns at their command ; many of themwere composed of incompetent men, and some were palpa-bly dishonest. Private charity saved many, but already, inJuly and August, scores of deaths from starvation wererecorded. In October and November these deaths werecounted by their daily rate: ten, fifteen, twenty even ina single refugeecamp, where per-haps ten or fif-teen thousandwere morenumerous werethe deaths fromdisease. Thefilthiness of thecamps, and ofthe refugeesthemselves,combined withthe lack of food,made them aready prey toepideipics. First came
Brazil, the Amazons and the coast . ns at their command ; many of themwere composed of incompetent men, and some were palpa-bly dishonest. Private charity saved many, but already, inJuly and August, scores of deaths from starvation wererecorded. In October and November these deaths werecounted by their daily rate: ten, fifteen, twenty even ina single refugeecamp, where per-haps ten or fif-teen thousandwere morenumerous werethe deaths fromdisease. Thefilthiness of thecamps, and ofthe refugeesthemselves,combined withthe lack of food,made them aready prey toepideipics. First came fevers ; then the curious, paralyticberi-beri; then small-pox, which, happily, was not wide-spread at this time, though it steadily gained ground. Theauthorities neglected to enforce any efficient sanitary meas-ures ; the Provincial Government was weak, and the peoplelooked on helplessly. Throughout the province, probablyfifty thousand people died during this first famine-year. At the beginning of 1878 the condition of the province. Group of Refugee Children (from a photograph.) 414 BRAZIL. was this: The open country was generally abandoned;nearly the whole population was gathered about the villa-ges, and the plains were left, black and desolate. A largeproportion of the cattle had perished ; the plantations werewithered except on a few fertile hill-sides, as at Baturite,where running water still came down from the springs. Be-tween the interior towns and the coast there was a band ofalmost impassable wilderness, where the ground was utterlydry, where not so much as a blade of green grass appeared,where the river-beds were strips of heated sand and clay,yielding no water, even by the usual method of diggingholes to the subsoil. At Ico and Telha, the death-rate,from starvation alone, was more than a score each desolate plains and famishing people were ruled bya weak government; the provincial treasury was almostempty; provisions sent from Rio were locked up in thepubli
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