The steering, too, was
also much more difficult with the stern of the canoe so far out of the
water.

I pointed out the mistake to my men, but it was no use arguing, and they
refused to follow my advice. Like all ignorant people, they thought they
knew everything better than anybody else, and as, in a way, they were the
chief sufferers for their own conceit, I thought I would avoid
unpleasantness and let them do things their own way as long as we kept
going forward on our journey.

Alcides, too, who by now had become imbued with the idea that he was as
good a navigator as Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama, had the
strangest notions of navigation. He never avoided grounding the canoe on
every bank he saw; he never avoided dashing the canoe into every rock
which stood or did not stand in our way. I never could understand exactly
why he did that, except for the mischievous pleasure he derived from
giving the men who were sitting at the other end of the canoe a violent
bump, which often rolled them over altogether.

When we left Goyaz my men insisted on purchasing life-belts in case we
should be travelling by water. As only one of the Goyaz men could swim, I
had gladly given them the money to purchase those articles. On our first
day of navigation the men amused me very much, as they all appeared
garbed in their life-belts, as if we had been going to the rescue of a
stranded ship in a tempest. I laughed heartily at the sight. The intense
heat of the sun made the heavy cork belts so uncomfortable for them, that
they discarded them when they saw that the canoe would actually float on
the water, and packed them away inside a wooden box, which they then
screwed down tight. The belts remained in that box most of the time,
except one day when a man put one on, as I had given him instructions to
go some way off in the centre of the stream where the current was rather
swift. By misadventure he lost his footing, and had we not been quick in
going to his rescue he certainly would have been drowned.

We tested the life-belts, and I found that not only would they not float
after they had been a minute or two in the water, but they became so
heavy when soaked with moisture that they would have dragged to the
bottom even a fair swimmer. They were evidently old discarded ship belts.
The cork, enclosed in a canvas cover, had got decomposed and pulverized,
and therefore rendered useless.

As we are referring to the strange ways of