You cannot help being properly excited when you anchor off your first Brazilian city, Pernambuco—the sugar-shipping port. It lies two miles away—a low line of light-colored buildings with palm trees interspersed. Between you and it is the strange wall, the natural breakwater, which looks as if some human engineer had planned it there; narrow, level, twelve feet above high water, with the surf broken into white foam against its side. This reef follows the coast for several hundred miles, but not always above the water line. Opposite your anchorage is the break in the wall which would let a lighter vessel than yours over the reef; and in the quiet harbor lie the smallish craft from everywhere. At the end of the reef near you is an old bit of a Dutch fort, and it dawns on your mind that in the colonizing times between 1530 and 1660 this land was owned successively by Portugal, Spain, England, Holland and finally by Portugal again.
You may feel very superior in some ways to what you see when you go ashore, but not in the antiquity of your country nor the superiority of your coffee. The truth is you are in a life wholly different from anything you live in at home. You look down the narrow streets at buildings which remind you of the different colonists who built there. Close by is a public building, the outside walls of which are faced in pattern with glazed tiles in green and yellow like your neighbor's new mantelpiece. Next is a stucco building, tinted to imitate pink marble, with sky-blue trimmings. It makes you laugh, it's all so gay, but it seems pleasant after all that any people should want their very houses and stores and town halls to look so cheerful. You are not quite used to seeing fair-sized children in the street without clothes, but they are black mostly who avail themselves of such liberty. You look at the street cars, which your English companion calls a "tram" and your Brazilian escort a "bond," and their unsleek little mules with their long fur all welted where they have been beaten, suggest room for a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
You ride over the long iron bridge built in Dom Pedro's time to the suburb where fine residences make you realize anew how the people love brightness—for in the gardens are not only brilliant flowering plants, but wire frames among the shrubbery holding great quicksilvered balls, and your confused sense is of a continuous Christmas tree in hot weather with no gift for you. Indeed you feel in a very foreign land. There is not a tree or plant you have seen outside of greenhouses. The colors are all more brilliant, the motions more slow, the greetings more elaborate, the beggars more loathsome, the whole place more ancient and semi-decayed than anything you know. Every wall is thick to keep out the heat, every window has its "Venetian," behind which you fancy are eyes.
A fellow-traveller on the steamer knows the life here and has been assuring you that the climate is delightful: that no one ever takes cold; that windows never are shut; that the same weight of clothing can be worn the year around; that the foreign colony is agreeable, the hand-made lace is pretty and durable, and the best "drawn-work" simply exquisite.
Six strong men row you over the two miles to your ship. Outside the reef it is rough enough to keep you very still in your little boat and glad to exchange it for a steamer, and you wonder if you can be quick enough to catch the ladder as the wave lifts your boat to meet it. It has seemed to you the last few minutes that the miracle of Peter walking on the water was being repeated several times about you on that rough sea, only these modern sea-walkers have a mast and a bench. It is really the fishermen's catamaran, a raft constantly washed by the sea, navigated by a sail.
The ship is as familiar a home now as you can remember, and you think you know everything that can happen to you there. You have ld and unld freight, listened to the noise of the ice-manufacturing, the dumping of the ashes from the furnace-room in the early morning, and the daily scrubbing down of the decks at 4 A.M. You have watched the crew go through the fire drill and the drill of manning the lifeboats. You have listened to the Captain's stories of helping disabled ships in mid-ocean, and the heavy expense of it, and learned how they signal their distress with rockets. You know Sunday in port and Sunday at sea, how to count the "bells," and change your watch daily to the new time. But while you are eating the first half of your dinner that night you realize that you are an object of interest to your next neighbor at table, a bon vivant who has made this journey many times before. You cannot think what is the cause of his suppressed excitement. You like the fresh vegetables that have come aboard and remember your childhood when you look at the new bouquets which decorate the tables—such old-time solid pyramids of posies. At length dessert is reached. The steward brings a whole pineapple, lifts its cap (the entire outside), reveals the juicy inside cut in slices which you taste. Now you know what your neighbor wanted to see, your surprise and delight in the Pernambuco "pines," the abacaxi (abà-ca-shee). Make the most of the abundance of this ripe, rich-flavored, tender, fiberless fruit here, for you probably won't find anything else that tastes so good.
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