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Updated: July 20, 2025
Now would appear a flock of capivaras or chiguires, as they are also called the largest of rodent animals, basking upon some sunny bank, raising their great rabbit-like heads, and gazing curiously at the passing periagua. Perhaps before the travellers had lost sight of them, the whole gang would be seen suddenly starting from their attitudes of repose, and in desperate rush making for the water.
The stroke-oarsman gabbled Indian, and uttered strange cries, much after the fashion of a pig-driver driving his pigs. We started with a light breeze against us, but yet reached the Capella de Cucao before it was late. The country on each side of the lake was one unbroken forest. In the same periagua with us, a cow was embarked.
On Cape Corientes there was a Spanish garrison of forty soldiers, chiefly mulattoes and caribs, who owned a swift periagua, fitted with oars and sails. They kept sentinels always upon the Cape, and whenever a ship hove in sight they would "launch out," and seize her, and cut the throats of all on board, "for fear of telling Tales."
The commandant, in the most authoritative manner, ordered six Indians to get ready to pull us over, without deigning to tell them whether they would be paid. The periagua is a strange rough boat, but the crew were still stranger: I doubt if six uglier little men ever got into a boat together. They pulled, however, very well and cheerfully.
Recovering his self-composure, however, he lifted his hat to la belle Barbérie, and the periagua dashed on, in triumph. Still the leading cutter was near the shore, where it soon arrived, the crew lying on their oars at the end of the wharf, in evident expectation of the arrival of the ferry-boat.
It cost me near three months more to clear the inside, and work it out so as to make an exact boat of it; this I did, indeed, without fire, by mere mallet and chisel, and by the dint of hard labour, till I had brought it to be a very handsome periagua, and big enough to have carried six-and-twenty men, and consequently big enough to have carried me and all my cargo.
It cost me near three months more to clear the inside, and work it out so as to make an exact boat of it: this I did indeed without fire, by mere mallet and chissel, and by the dint of hard labour; till I had brought it to be a very handsome periagua, and big enough to have carried six-and-twenty men, and consequently big enough to have carried me and all my cargo.
They were passing a place where these wild cinnamon-trees lined the banks of the stream; and, in order to make a closer examination of such an interesting species, Alexis landed from the periagua, Ivan went along with him taking his double-barrelled gun, in hopes of getting a shot at something.
He was closely attended to the place where he hailed the periagua, by four or five loungers, who studied his manner and movements with the admiration that men of their class seldom fail to bestow on those who bear about them the evidence of having passed lives of adventure, and perhaps of hardship and daring.
Although the known mouth of the Pilcomayo is almost within gun-shot of Assuncion the oldest Spanish settlement in this part of South America no Paraguayan ever thinks of attempting its ascent, and the people of the town are as ignorant of the land lying along that river's shores as on the day when the old naturalist, Azara, paddles his periagua some forty miles against its obstructing current.
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