Although both the soil and climate of the mission are well adapted for the cultivation of the various productions of the tropics, the inhabitants are so indolent, that they are generally in a state of starvation; I could procure neither farinha de mandiocca, rice, yams, sweet potatoes, plantains, nor bananas, and when we arrived, our stock of beef being quite exhausted, it was with the greatest difficulty I succeeded in purchasing a cow. All the cattle which exist in the mission amount only to about forty, and these belong to two individuals. They possess altogether only seventeen horses. The principal part of the food of these people is of a vegetable nature, consisting of wild fruits which they obtain from the woods, such as the nuts of different kinds of palms, the fruit of the Pika, Pusá, Mangába, Jatobá, Pitomba, Guava, Araçá, &c. At the season we were among them, the principal fruit they made use of, was a kind of palm nut, about an inch and a half long, which they called Shódó. They first cut the fleshy substance, which corresponds with the fibrous portion of the cocoa-nut, and a large stone which is generally placed at the door, is used for breaking the nut upon, in order to procure the substance within. Numbers of these Indians used to start early in the morning, being roused by a kind of drum, and go to the woods to the westward to collect these nuts, and during the day nothing was to be heard in the Aldea, but the breaking of them between the two stones. The little animal food they do eat, is procured by hunting, and this is an occupation which the young men are much fonder of, than working in a plantation. A few days after we arrived, thirteen or fourteen of them set off on a hunting excursion to the other side of the Chapada da Mangabeira, and after an absence of eight days, they returned well loaded with the flesh of deer, and of the large kind of Peccary (Queixado), in a half-roasted state, this being the plan they make use of, for preserving it for a few days, having no salt for curing it. On their return to the Aldea, this spoil was divided among their friends; it was all immediately devoured without salt or any kind of vegetable, except a few small capsicums. On the following day, scarcely an Indian was to be seen stirring abroad; like the boa constrictor, they were sleeping away the effects of their over-dose of food. When our cow was killed, I was fearful we should not be allowed to keep any of it to ourselves; for one came begging the head, another the feet, a third the liver, and so on, with all the internal parts; and when these were exhausted, they even began to ask for pieces of the beef itself.