The pilot had to look after the channels of the river, the deviations of the current, the eddies which it was necessary to avoid, the creeks or bays which afforded favorable anchorage, and to do this he had to be in the bow.
If the pilot was the material director of this immense machine--for can we not justly call it so ?--another personage was its spiritual director; this was Padre Passanha, who had charge of the mission at Iquitos.
A religious family, like that of Joam Garral's, had availed themselves enthusiastically of this occasion of taking him with them.
Padre Passanha, then aged seventy, was a man of great worth, full of evangelical fervor, charitable and good, and in countries where the representatives of religion are not always examples of the virtues, he stood out as the accomplished type of those great missionaries who have done so much for civilization in the interior of the most savage regions of the world.
For fifty years Padre Passanha had lived at Iquitos, in the mission of which he was the chief.

He was loved by all, and worthily so.

The Garral family held him in great esteem; it was he who had married the daughter of Farmer Magalhaes to the clerk who had been received at the fazenda.
He had known the children from birth; he had baptized them, educated them, and hoped to give each of them the nuptial blessing.
The age of the padre did not allow of his exercising his important ministry any longer.

The horn of retreat for him had sounded; he was about to be replaced at Iquitos by a younger missionary, and he was preparing to return to Para, to end his days in one of those convents which are reserved for the old servants of God.
What better occasion could offer than that of descending the river with the family which was as his own?
They had proposed it to him, and he had accepted, and when arrived at Belem he was to marry the young couple, Minha and Manoel.
But if Padre Passanha during the course of the voyage was to take his meals with the family, Joam Garral desired to build for him a dwelling apart, and heaven knows what care Yaquita and her daughter took to make him comfortable! Assuredly the good old priest had never been so lodged in his modest parsonage! The parsonage was not enough for Padre Passanha; he ought to have a chapel.
The chapel then was built in the center of the jangada, and a little bell surmounted it.
It was small enough, undoubtedly, and it could not hold the whole of the crew, but it was richly decorated, and if Joam Garral found his own house on the raft, Padre Passanha had no cause to regret the poverty-stricken church of Iquitos.
Such was the wonderful structure which was going down the Amazon.

It was then on the bank waiting till the flood came to carry it away.