The governing image of the Barquinha is a vessel. The centre is a boat, the members are its crew, the missionary work is a voyage, and the souls carried include the dead as well as the living. That image organises everything else. Services follow the Catholic calendar closely, with festivals for Saint John, Saint Sebastian and the Immaculate Conception, and the liturgical year matters more here than in either of the other two Amazonian traditions.
Hymns are received and sung as in Santo Daime, but the Barquinha also incorporates spirits in the manner familiar from Umbanda and Brazilian spiritism, including the caboclo and preto velho figures, and a considerable part of the work is charitable: feeding, treating and burying the poor of Rio Branco. Daniel Pereira de Mattos had been a sailor before he was anything else, which is usually offered as the origin of the imagery, and he came to the practice through the circle around Mestre Irineu before founding his own house in 1945.
The tradition remains small and largely confined to Acre. It is the least documented of the three, and most of what has been written about it is recent Brazilian scholarship rather than anything in English. Barquinha accounts also describe a blue book shown to the founder in a vision, holding the doctrine he was to establish, and that image of a book received rather than written sits at the centre of how the tradition explains its own origin.