I never recal to mind the civilities I received at this city without the most grateful emotions, in which those will best sympathize who have known what it is to visit a remote city in a strange country, where, according to the narratives of preceding travellers, nothing prevailed but barbarism and inhospitality, and where they have been agreeably undeceived. It may easily be supposed that I found it difficult to reconcile the character of the Paulistas, such as I beheld it, with the strange accounts of their spurious origin, quoted by modern geographers. These accounts, founded on the suspicious testimony of the Jesuits of Paraguay, and at variance with the best Portuguese historians, have been of late most ably confuted by an enlightened member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Lisbon[22]. He fully exposes the inconsistencies of Vaissette and Charlevoix, in ascribing the origin of S. Paulo to a band of refugees, composed of Spaniards, Portuguese, Mestiços, Mulattos, and others, who fled hither from various parts of Brazil, and established a free-booting republic; and he satisfactorily shews that the first settlers were Indians of Piratininga and Jesuits, and that the city, from its first foundation, never acknowledged any other sovereignty than that of Portugal. The veracity of this account is further supported by the predominant character of the Paulistas, who, far from inheriting the obloquy, which an ancestry of rogues and vagabonds would have entailed upon them, have long been famed throughout all Brazil for their probity, their industry, and the mildness of their manners[23].
_Coasting Voyage from Santos to Sapitiva, and Journey thence to Rio de Janeiro._
WE left S. Paulo at ten in the morning, and took the same road to Santos by which we had come, there being no other, fit to travel. On the following day, before noon, we arrived at Cubatão, where we were detained by rain, until four in the afternoon. About seven we arrived at Santos, and as we were provided with a letter of introduction to a judge, and another to a merchant, we relied on a kinder welcome than we had met with on our first visit, the more so as we came from S. Paulo. We were, however, deceived. The judge received us coldly, and when I asked him where the person lived to whom our other letter was addressed, he seemed quite rejoiced at the opportunity for shewing us out of his house. The merchant was as frigid as the judge, and made us a paltry excuse. We then repaired to an apothecary, from whom we had experienced some acts of urbanity, and who had attended one of our friends, who, having left S. Paulo in a bad state of health, had waited here three weeks for a passage to Rio de Janeiro. After telling him our situation, and stating that the wet weather prevented us from passing the night in our canoe, he kindly offered us his shop-floor for a lodging, it being the only place under cover he had to spare. We commissioned him to offer four dollars to any of his neighbours who would admit us for the night, but he said it would be of no avail, as the people of Santos were proverbially notorious for their want of hospitality. The great influx of strangers and renegadoes from all nations into this and other towns on the coast, had completely steeled the hearts of the people against those claims on their good-will, which the inhabitants of the interior, less frequently imposed upon, are ever ready to acknowledge and to satisfy.