We began to move at four in the morning, and I went out to watch by the light of half a moon and the Southern Cross our exit from one of the most difficult ports in South America. Barely had we crossed the bar when our sea-going tug began to rock like a canoe, and not only the bishop but even as old a seadog as I took no interest in the ten o’clock “breakfast.” The Ilheos claimed to have twin screws, but they must have been turning in opposite directions, for we made far less speed than the coast swells that rolled us about like an empty bottle. The shore was made up almost entirely of dreary wastes of white sand, sometimes in broad flat stretches, sometimes drifted up into dunes. At times a suggestion of forest appeared far back of this, but there were few if any signs of habitation.
About noon the water about us turned from deep blue to a muddy red, a great streak of which thrust itself out into the ocean from the outlet of the River São Francisco. We turned into this across a broad sandbar and found it a mile or more wide, though frequently split up by islands, long, flat, and green. This river, largest between the Plata and the Amazon, rises far to the south, near the old capital of Minas Geraes, and has about the same volume of water as the Hudson. Thatched villages and small cities line its banks for hundreds of miles and side-wheel river steamers mount it in two sections, to Pirapora, in Minas Geraes, terminus of the “Central Railway of Brazil.” We stopped at several villages near the mouth, then pushed on inland. The rolling had ceased and the bishop was out now parading the deck behind a big black cigar. The shores were sandy and nearly flat, with palm-trees, some sugar-cane, and a considerable population of more or less negroes. At length the town of Villa Nova, two centuries old for all its name, appeared on the nose of a bluff, and beyond, on the right-hand or Alagoas bank, the city of Penedo, not unlike a smaller Bahia in situation, with several bulking old churches and here and there a majestic imperial palm-tree rising above all else.
We dropped anchor before Villa Nova, with its several textile mills, and were soon completely hemmed in by cargo barges, though not before I had slipped across to Penedo, from which we were to sail at four in the morning. Considering the time it had taken to get there, it was hard to believe that this was only forty-five miles north of Aracajú! Before the town lay one of the side-wheel river steamers, and many “chatties,” barges, and sailboats, not to mention countless dugout canoes, which ply the lower São Francisco to the falls of Paulo Affonso, two hundred miles up and “greater than Niagara,” according to my fellow-passengers. Here and there groups of women were dipping up water and washing garments, in the same spots. All the dwellers along its shore drink the muddy São Francisco, nature, or at best filtered through a porous stone. No one is ever seen swimming in these parts, either in river or sea.
The mailboat leaves Aracajú for the towns across the bay
Another Brazilian milkman
Carnival costumes representing “A Crise,” or hard times
