A truly hard voyage for us all was that to Montevideo! The survivors
reached home after a while. Their features were terribly marked and
disfigured; so much so that I did not know them till they accosted me
when we met.
I look back with pleasure to the good character of my Brazilian sailors,
regretting the more their hard luck and sad fate! We may meet again!
_Quien sabe!_
Getting over all this sad business as best we could, we entered on the
next venture, which was to purchase and load a cargo of the famous
Brazilian wood. The _Aquidneck_ was shifted to an arm of the bay, where
she was moored under the lee of a virgin forest, twenty minutes' canoe
ride from the village of Guarakasava, where she soon began to load.
The timber of this country, generally very heavy, is nevertheless hauled
by hand to the water, where, lashed to canoes, it is floated to the
ship.
These canoes, formed sometimes from mammoth trees, skilfully shaped and
dug out with care, are at once the carriage and _cariole_ of the family
to the _citio_, or the rice to mill. Roads are hardly known where the
canoe is available; men, women, and children are consequently alike,
skilled in the art of canoeing to perfection, almost.
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