tay in this place to allay in some measure the ferment that had been
raised among my men, I now set myself to provide for the carrying on of
my voyage with more heart than before, and put all hands to work, in
order to it, as fast as the backwardness of my men would permit; who
showed continually their unwillingness to proceed farther. Besides, their
heads were generally filled with strange notions of southerly winds that
were now setting in (and there had been already some flurries of them)
which, as they surmised, would hinder any farther attempts of going on to
the southward so long as they should last.

The winds begin to shift here in April and September, and the seasons of
the year (the dry and the wet) alter with them. In April the southerly
winds make their entrance on this coast, bringing in the wet season, with
violent tornados, thunder and lightning, and much rain. In September the
other coasting trade at east-north-east comes in and clears the sky,
bringing fair weather. This, as to the change of wind, is what I have
observed, but as to the change of weather accompanying it so exactly here
at Bahia this is a particular exception to what I have experienced in all
other places of south latitudes that I have been in between the tropics,
or those I have heard of; for there the dry season sets in, in April, and
the wet about October or November, sooner or later (as I have said that
they are, in south latitudes, the reverse of the seasons, or weather, in
the same months in north latitudes, whereas on this coast of Brazil the
wet season comes in in April at the same time that it doth in north
latitudes, and the dry (as I have said here) in September; the rains here
not lasting so far in the year as in other places; for in September the
weather is usually so fair that in the latter part of that month they
begin to cut their sugarcane here, as I was told; for I enquired
particularly about the seasons: though this, as to the season of cutting
of cane, which I was now assured to be in September, agrees not very well
with that I was formerly told, that in Brazil they cut the cane in July.
And so as to what is said a little lower in the same page, that in
managing their cane they are not confined to the seasons, this ought to
have been expressed only of planting them; for they never cut them but in
the dry season.

But to return to the southerly winds, which came in (as I expected they
would) while I was here: these daun