Journal of a Voyage to Brazil

In Brazil the land that was granted by leagues was to be won by inches from the hordes of savages who succeeded each other in incalculable multitudes, and whose migratory habits rendered it a matter of course for one tribe immediately to occupy the ground from which its predecessors had been driven. Hence the history of the early settlers in Brazil presents none of those splendid and chivalresque pictures that the chronicles of the Corteses, and Pizarros, and Almagros furnish. They are plain, and often pathetic scenes of human life, full of patience, and enterprise, and endurance; but the wickedness that stains even the best of them, is the more disgusting as it is more sordid.