AN EXTRAORDINARY STORY

The Coffee JACINTO: STRONGMAN

IN 1905, AS THE GREEN GOLD RUSH GATHERED MOMENTUM, MILLIONS OF EUROPEANS CAME TO TRY THEIR LUCK IN THE NEW WORLD. LEGEND HAS IT THAT JACINTO WAS ONE OF THEM: A WORKER WHO WANTED TO MAKE A NAME FOR HIMSELF IN THE COFFEE INDUSTRY, USING HIS ARMS ALONE.

By Kim Levy Illustration Icinori

AFTER A CROSSING OF SEVERAL WEEKS TO REACH THE SOUTH AMERICAN COAST FROM SOUTHERN EUROPE, Jacinto disembarked from a bulky steamer docked at the port of Santos. This industrial town 60 kilometres south of São Paulo is where folktales say the young man’s exploits began. It is easy to imagine this part of his existence. The boy resembled his companions, all Latin people from Europe, sweating in the sweltering Brazilian climate. Just one thing, still unseen by the world, set this man apart from the rest: his impressive strength…and his desire to unleash it. From the new quays built in 1905 to meet the growing demand for coffee in the West, Jacinto studied a long line of haulers loading an outbound ship. Behind their bent heads, they balanced burlap bags chock-full of green coffee. It reminded him strongly of an anthill. So that was the life of a worker here: heroically strolling from the warehouse to the ship’s hold. “I’ll be the best of them,” he thought to himself with a smile. He set off for São Paulo to find lodging and took several days to adapt to his new life, even though everything reminded him of the old continent: the architecture, the Belle Époque style and the astonishing reproduction of London’s Big Ben clock that he glimpsed along the way. The English and Portuguese bourgeois manufacturers seemed familiar to him as well. It is they who finally hired him to work at Santos. In the port, the largest in all of Latin America, it was men –not the brand-new cranes for the port’s goods traffic – that packaged and conveyed the delicate green beans harvested in the mountains of the Paraíba Valley. Jacinto was untroubled: every day, without batting an eye, he hauled the 83 bags required to receive the minimum wage. But his courage annoyed the other workers. They saw him as a rival and decided to confront him publicly. Contests of strength were held on the docks. People bet on the most muscular men, even though those who had seen Jacinto at work knew the others had no chance. He wasn’t just tough – he was a giant who managed to stack five 60-kilo bags on the back of his neck. The stunned crowd immediately nicknamed him “Samson of the pier”, a nod to the mythological hero whose strength lay in his hair. In photos of the period by photographer José Marques Pereira, a man is immortalised –smiling in a striped undershirt – while accomplishing this astonishing feat. The shot was used on postcards, the popular medium of the early century. But could it be proven that it was indeed Jacinto? And how could such a load be lifted? Even today, historians are attempting to substantiate the theory behind such an exploit. “After interviewing the Santos handlers and baggers in the 1960s,” says Bruno Bortoloto do Carmo, a researcher at the Santos Museu do Café, “we are convinced that two bags already formed a load that few people could carry. Perhaps some of the bags contained other, lighter goods, such as peanuts?” But these doubts do not keep this coffee museum from displaying a statue of Jacinto carrying five sacks. In Brazil, he embodies the man who, some seventeen years after the end of slavery, helped build this country – with nothing but sheer strength. n