British Enterprise in Brazil: The St. John d'el Rey Mining Company and the Morro Velho Gold Mine, 1830-1960.

British Enterprise in Brazil: The St. John d'el Rey Mining Company and the Morro Velho Gold Mine, 1830-1960 J. Fred Rippy once estimated that the English invested in close to four hundred mining companies in nineteenth-century Latin America, of which fewer than twenty became profitable. The most lucrative of them all was the Morro Velho property, situated in the interior Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, and acquired by the St. John d'el Rey Company in 1834. As its firm's name suggests, that company began operations at the old mining district of Sao Joao del Rey, but when operations there proved unrewarding it purchased the Morro Velho mine, situated 20 kilometers from the modern state …