On the twelfth of March I took leave of my Indian friends, and embarked in a canoe which I hired to take me down to Penêdo, having been exactly a fortnight on the island. We reached that place on the morning of the fourteenth, when I received a kind welcome from my friend the Juiz de Direito. I landed several times during the passage, for the purpose of making collections of living plants of the different kinds of _Cacti_, which grow in great abundance on the banks of the river, wherever they are rocky. At one of the places where we stopped, I observed several fine trees of _Peltophorum Vogelianum_, Benth. This tree, which belongs to the natural order _Leguminosæ_, reaches to the height of about forty feet, and has a great branching top: the leaves are large but very much subdivided, and very graceful, having more the appearance of the frond of a fern, than the leaf of a tree. The racemes of flowers which grow at the ends of the branches, are often more than a foot long, and the flowers are of a beautiful golden colour; at a distance it presents a more magnificent appearance, than almost any other tree I have seen. The canoe was carried down the stream by the force of the current, but in the afternoon, and during the greater part of the night, the sea breeze blew so strong as to impede our progress. The boatmen, however, adopted a plan to overcome this, which I have never seen elsewhere, nor even heard of, and I will therefore explain it in a few words. Landing at a place where the trees grew in abundance, the men set to work, and cut off a considerable number of branches, which were tied tightly together with cords, one end of a long rope was made fast round its middle, while the other end was secured to the canoe. They then steered for a part of the river where the current was strong, and threw the bundle overboard, which being heavy from its green state, floated just below the surface of the water, and in this manner being entirely out of the influence of the wind, it received the whole force of the current, by which means the canoe was dragged down at a rate little inferior to that by which we descended during the calm of the day.