The name means little boat, and the image is not decorative. A Barquinha house is understood as a vessel, those who work in it as its crew, and the work itself as a voyage undertaken on behalf of souls, the dead included. The founder had been a sailor before he was a barber, which is the explanation usually given for where the imagery came from, and the tradition explains its own origin through a book shown to him in a vision, blue, holding the doctrine he was to establish. A doctrine received rather than composed is a claim the other two Brazilian ayahuasca religions also make in their own way, and here it is made about a book.
Three things distinguish a work from what a visitor might expect after reading about Santo Daime. The Catholic liturgical year is followed closely, with festivals kept for Saint John, Saint Sebastian and the Immaculate Conception, and the calendar carries more weight here than in either of the others. Spirits are incorporated, in the manner familiar from Umbanda and Brazilian spiritism, with the caboclo and the preto velho among the figures received. And a substantial part of what a house does is charitable and physical: feeding people, treating them, and burying them.
That last point is easy to skip past and it is central. The Barquinha is not organised around a hymnal alone or a doctrine alone. A house is a working charity in a poor city, and the spiritual voyage and the practical relief of the neighbourhood are described as the same activity rather than as a religious duty and a social one. Any account of the tradition that leaves it out has described the ceremonies and missed the mission.