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page 179 ---treatment of slaves----slave trade---
What is most apprehended in these purchases, are hidden corporeal defects,
and especially the very frequent disposition to blindness. When the choice
is made, the purchase money is fixed, which for a healthy negro male is
here from 350 to 500 florins: the seller generally making himself  answerable
for any corporeal defects that may be discovered within a fortnight.
The purchaser then takes away his slave, whom he destines according as
he wants him, to be a mechanic, a mule-driver, or a servant. The new proprietor
is now absolute master of the labor of his new slave and the produce of
it. But if he is guilty of inhuman treatment of him, he is liable, as
for other civil offenses, to be punished by the police or the tribunals. The tribunals take care, by means expressly adopted for the purpose, to
restore runaway slaves to their right owners, and punish the fugitives
if they renew the attempt, by putting an iron ring round their necks.
If the master will not punish his slaves himself, it is done after payment
of a certain sum, by the police in the Calabonco. Here, however,
as well as in Brazil in general, the negroes easily become habituated to the country. This
is a consequence of their easy tempers, as well as of the similarity of
the climate to that of their native country, and the mildness with which
they are treated in Brazil.
page 180 ---Trade---import----export---free trade---
Before the removal of the court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro,
the trade of this and all the other cities of Brazil was strictly
confined to Portugal.
The daily increasing production of valuable colonial articles, and the
diligent working of the gold mines in the interior of the country, had
greatly augmented, during the last hundred years, the riches and consequently
the wants of the Brazilians; the trade of Lisbon and Oporto therefore indemnified the mother country from
the loss of the East
Indies, from which it derived the first sources of its power
and greatness. The intimate political and mercantile union of those two
cities with the colony, was extremely favorable to the former; and the
more so, because its happy situation near the Mediterranean and the coasts of the ocean, on the route of universal commerce between Europe and the East Indies and West
Indies, made it more easy to dispose of colonial produce. The
Portugese merchants at that time, not only fixed at pleasure the prices
of all the productions of Brazil, which was obligated to sell
exclusively to them, but could likewise make their payments in European
merchandise, and upon conditions prescribed by themselves. Thus Lisbon,
at the close of the last century, had attained a degree of activity and
wealth, which made it next to London,
the foremost commercial city in the world. But after a royal decree Portugal had founded
the independence of the Brazilian commerce, this state of things very
quickly changed.
 
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