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There was no local colouring compared with the carregadores, or coolies, from the northeast, whose thrum-mop heads and single monkey skins for fig-leaves, spoke of the wold and the wild.
On this night, although I thought I had put my clothes out of reach, both the termites and the carregadores ants got at them, ate holes in one boot, ate one leg of my drawers, and riddled my handkerchief; and I now had nothing to replace anything that was destroyed. Next day Lyra, Kermit, and their camaradas brought the five canoes that were left down to camp.
At this camp the carregadores ants completely devoured the doctor's undershirt, and ate holes in his mosquito-net; and they also ate the strap of Lyra's gun-case. The little stingless bees, of many kinds, swarmed in such multitudes, and were so persevering, that we had to wear our head-nets when we wrote or skinned specimens. The following day was almost without rain.
These are so called in the books the Brazilians call them "carregadores," or porters because they are always carrying bits of leaves and blades of grass to their underground homes.
Hardworking, willing, and tough though the camaradas were, they naturally did not have the skill of northern lumberjacks. We hoped to finish the two canoes in three days. A space was cleared in the forest for our tents. Among the taller trees grew huge-leafed pacovas, or wild bananas. We bathed and swam in the river, although in it we caught piranhas. Carregadores ants swarmed all around our camp.
My conviction, after nearly four years of travel upon the West African coast, is this: if Sierra Leone men be used, they must be mixed with Cabindas and with Congoese "carregadores," registered in presence of the Portuguese authorities at S. Paulo de Loanda.
Fort Sao Francisco, called "do Penedo," because founded upon and let into a rock, with the double-tiered batteries a la Vauban, carefully whitewashed and subtended by any amount of dead ground, commands the anchorage and the northern road, where strings of carregadores, like driver-ants, fetch and carry provisions to town.
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