Arrived opposite Goa, we were cast adrift in the open sea, as is usual, on account of an unbuoyed and doubtful shoal, and we had eight miles to row before we could reach Goa. You may imagine what that means in a storm. The mail agents must do this, monsoon weather as well, once a fortnight all the year through, and the return ships are in the dead of the night, besides living in a fœtid hole, where they get none of the comforts of life, and never see a soul. The Portuguese manage to make every place look like Lisbon; actually the features of the country grow the same. There is the same abrupt entrance to the sea between mountainous cliffs, up a broad winding river or sea arm, with wooded rising banks, with the same white town perched on its banks, a perfect Santos in Brazil, which is 24º south of the Equator. We rowed a mile and a half of open sea, five miles of bay, and one and a half of winding river, to a little stone pier landing at Panjim (New Goa). All Portuguese India is only a strip of about seventy miles long, and very narrow, which they would do much better to sell to the British Government; for of all the God-forgotten, deserted holes, a thousand years behind the rest of the creation, I have never seen anything to equal Goa, and I pitied from my heart the charming, kindly, gentle, hospitable people who have to live there. I have lived in sandy deserts, in primeval forests; I have suffered hunger, thirst, cold, heat, fatigue, privation, and danger, and thought it charming; but I hated the sort of life at Goa. It is dead, and there is nothing to reward one; only we were here for a purpose. [Sidenote: _Life there_.] There are three Goas, full of history and romance. There is the Inquisition to study, and there is the tomb of St. Francis Xavier. No. 1 is the _old_ Hindú Goa, now called San Lourenço, about six miles from Panjim (New Goa), upon the winding river, and two miles to the southward of Old Goa, or Goa Velha. It is only marked by a salt plain, and two hills with a church upon each, and a bit upon the plain. It is pretty healthy, and no one knows why it was deserted. Old Goa, or Goa Velha, is that of St. Francis Xavier; it is nine and a half kilometres from Panjim, by a good road along the winding river--a most picturesque locality, full of history, Catholic tradition, and the scene of the infamous Inquisition. It was deserted on account of malaria and fever for New Goa (called Panjim), where we landed, and where the few personages who are obliged to be there vegetate, except with an occasional change to Cazalem, the six cottages on the open beach of the bay corresponding to our Barra at Santos.