“As I proceeded to the house, I saw two negroes and a peon making a kind of basket for catching fish; they had just returned from town with Senor Josef, and were singing a canoe song, very common among the Spanish boatmen of the Gulf of Paria, the chorus of which was “Sopla, Sopla, Sopla, San Antonio,” a favourite saint to invoke when a wind is required, though sometimes so unreasonably deaf is the saint to their entreaties that I have heard him cursed heartily by Spanish mariners.”
[Going to Bed Without Your Dinner, From Leaves From a Log. A West India Story. Atkinson's Casket, 1835]