ROYAL PLANTERS.


Among the earliest and most successful planters was Count Maurice, of
Nassau, who flourished in the seventeenth century. This prince had the
advantage of operating in the genial clime, and with the fruitful soil of
Brazil, of which in the year 1636, he was governor. He was a man of taste
and elegance, and adorned his palaces and gardens in that country with a
magnificence worthy of the satraps of the east. His residence was upon an
island formed by the confluence of two rivers, a place which before he
commenced his improvements presented no very promising subject, being a
dreary, waste, and uncultivated plain, equally worthless and unattractive.
On this spot, however, he erected a splendid palace, laid out gardens
around it of extraordinary extent and magnificence; salubrity, seclusion,
horticultural ornament were all studiously and tastefully combined in the
arrangement of the buildings; the choicest fruits of a tropical climate,
the orange, the citron, the ananas, with many others unknown to us,
solicited at once the sight, the smell, and the taste; artificial
fountains of water preserved the coolness of the air, and maintained the
verdure of the earth; thirteen bastions and turrets flanked and defended
the gardens; and seven hundred trees of various sizes, of which some rose
to thirty, some to forty, and some to fifty feet high to the lowermost
branches, were removed to the spot, and arranged by the designer's skill
in such a manner as to produce the most striking and splendid effect. Some
of these trees were of seventy and others of eighty years growth. Being
skilfully taken up they were placed carefully in carriages, conveyed over
a space of from three to four miles in extent, transported on rafts across
both the rivers, and on being replanted in the island, so favourable were
both soil and vegetation in that genial climate, that they immediately