Across South America - 1911 Author:Hiram Bingham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II RIO, SANTOS, AND BRAZILIAN TRADE Two days' sail from Bahia brought us within sight of the wonderful mountains that mark the entrance to the Bay ... more »of Rio de Janeiro. As one approaches land, the first thing that catches the eye is the far-famed Sugar Loaf Mountain which seems to guard the southern side of the entrance. Back of it is a region even more romantic, a cluster of higher mountains, green to their tops, yet with sides so precipitous and pinnacles so sharp one wonders how anything can grow on them. The region presents, in fact, such a prodigious variety of crags and precipices, peaks and summits, that the separate forms are lost in a chaos of beautiful hills. The great granite rocks that guard the entrance to the harbor leave a passage scarcely a mile in width. At the base of the Sugar Loaf we saw a fairy white city romantically nestling in the shadow of the gigantic crag. It is the new National Exposition of Brazil. Once safely inside the granite barriers, the bay opens out and becomes an inland sea, dotted with hundreds of islands, a landlocked basin with fifty square miles of deep water. On the northern shores of the bay lies the town of Nictheroy, the capital of the state. Its name per- THE CORCOVA)DO FROM RIO petuates the old Indian title of the bay, "hidden water." The name of the capital of the Republic, on the south side of the bay, carries with it a remembrance of the fact that when first discovered, the bay was mistaken for the mouth of a great river, the River of January. Since the early years of the sixteenth century, Rio has been conspicuous in the annals of discovery and conquest. Magellan touched here on his famous voyage round the world. The spot where he landed is now the site of a large hospital and medical school. French Hu...« less