Ponta del Gada San Miguel Azores
I have read about and seen many places generally recognised as being of a singular beauty and interest, but never of this jewel of a sea town. For an artist it is a dream of delight of the most delicate colours reflected in a sunny sea. The houses are such as one may see in Spain or Italy, white, or of all the lighter variations of shades of pinks, white, pale greens and cinnamons, and they are built up to the water’s edge with only a margin of black volcanic rock showing between them and the sea. Most of them have their backs to the sea and have picturesque balconies and landing slips, but in the centre facing the harbour there is an open plaza with a church and tall square tower, and at its foot bosky round trees, dark green against the white walls, all reflected at the water’s edge.
After being visited by port officials, doctors and Customs officer we went to the plaza in our boat, and a Captain Pickford, of a neighbouring vessel, who kindly had come on board to leave his card, as it were, said, as we swung into a gap in the white sea wall into a small inner harbour: “This is rather a pretty bit we are coming to”—and I looked, and my breath almost went with the unexpected beauty. The dock or basin we swung into in our boat is built of black stone whitewashed to the water’s edge, with two flights of steps for people to land by. It is only about ninety yards square—houses of a slightly Venetian style on the land side rise from a double arcade, one arcade rising from the water with another inside it at a higher level, windows look out from the shaded inner arcade, white pillars of the arcades and arches support a house faced with blue tiles, with pointed windows and adjoining houses of pale pink and yellow tints. In the deep shadows of the alcoves and in the sun on the steps there were figures, men, women, and boys, mostly resting, some in brilliant colours, some in sombre tints; and these and white boats at their moorings were reflected in the waving dark ripples of the basin. For an artist I would say this hundred yards of light and shade and colour is worth all Venice.
Perhaps the colour of the light is the charm of the Azores; it is that Gulf Stream rich, colourful light that to me seems to increase south-westerly as you follow it, say from the west of Kirkcudbright to Spain, and westwards, till you come to the Saragossa Sea—a quality in the atmosphere that makes the night here redundant with colour and the day superlative.
Why do you not see quite such soft richness of colour in the air farther east? There is greater velvetyness of colour here in the Azores than in Madeira, or the west of Spain, or anywhere in the Mediterranean, or the Far East.
I could sit here for weeks, day and night, watching the changing effects, the queer parrot-coloured weathered boats, with their furled-up white cotton sails coming alongside the steps; the steps are greenish black volcanic stone, whitewashed, and the stone shows here and there, and the white is of infinite variety of tints and the sunlight is so soft and mellow that patches of colour, say a man’s pink shirt, or a patch of emerald-green cloth, catch the eye with their soft intensity and your eye goes back and forwards revelling in the pleasure of the soft clash of battling colour, and tints.
The boats that come in from the blue are vivid in colouring, brilliant emerald, yellow, and scarlet, with thick white cotton sails. The largest are three-masted feluccas, long and narrow, with sails like swallows’ wings. Each has a crew of at least eleven men and boys, with brown faces and black hair and beards. They go bare-footed, and wear a peaked pointed knitted cap exactly the same as we have in the Fair Isle off Shetland; and each figure is a joy for ever of sun-bitten, faded-coloured garments of many colours. Then think of these figures in the blue night moving noiselessly with bare feet, unloading short yellow planks for pineapple boxes in half electric, half moonlight, the velvety shadows of the tropics and all the vivid colours of the day still distinct, but softened down to a mothlike texture, and the blue tiles on the house above the arches glittering in the moon’s rays.
If you add to these sensations of colour, and the perfect stillness, the scent of pinewood planks and the perfume of pineapples you have an air to linger over, a delicious intoxication.
Both the people of Ponta Delgada and the town itself are very clean. Living in the Portuguese Hotel costs five shillings per day, with extremely good feeding—beef from oxen on the hills fed on wild geraniums, heath, and hydrangeas, and fish of many kinds.
I tried my trammel net for fish alongside in the bay. I set it with the second mate’s help; it is forty fathoms in length, and by midday there was quite a good catch of many-coloured bream, and those exquisite silvery fish, about the size and shape of a saucer, that are such excellent eating. The trammel net is quite new here, and is new to my Norwegian companions and to the natives. I find it of much use on our Berwickshire coast for supplying the house with fish. It consists of a wall, as it were, of fine net hung between two nets of very large mesh; with corks on top and leads below. It can be set either standing on the bottom or hanging from the surface—the fish swim against it, make a bag of the fine net through a mesh of either of the big nets, and in this pocket they stay till you overhaul your net, possibly once a day.
Here we found a worm like one leg of a star-fish made such havoc with our captive fish in the net that we had to overhaul it every four hours or so. On the second evening I got three splendid fish, like salmon, of about six pounds each, with large silvery scales and small heads—cavallas, I hear them called.
Whatever their name may be, of one thing I am certain, they make splendid eating, and taste like small mahseer—of course everyone knows their taste!
I rigged up a bamboo rod, using cast of Loch Leven flies, with the wings cut off, with small pieces of sardine for bait. We made quite good baskets of young bonita, and tunny, and sardines: tunny fry, of course; a two-year-old tunny would snap strong salmon gut and a full-grown tunny takes a rope as thick as a stylo pen to pull it in; and lots of time. You can even take them on a tarpon line if you think life is too long.
A thing I could not understand about this small-game hunting was the way certain silvery fish eluded our efforts to catch them. Whilst other fish ate the finely chopped sardine meat we threw over, and young mackerel and herring, etc., calmly took our hooks baited with pieces of sardine, these flat silvery fish like saucers on edge almost at once grasped our idea—they eyed the bait and hook, sailed along the gut of the dropper, examining it closely, sailed up the gut of the cast and said: “No, no, we will take bait without a hook, but not this.” I wonder why their perception should be so much keener than those of the other fish; probably none of them had ever seen a hook in their lives.
But this writing about small fry is “wandering from the point,” as the cook said to the eel; let us get back to whaling or at least to whale-hunting.
We are off to the west end of San Miguel to go round it and beat about the north side in search of the whales which everyone tells us are to be found there, and the view of glens and woods and fields bathed in sunshine under the cloud-capped hills is very sweetly refreshing. But luxurious rolling on the blue seas and all the sweet scenery hardly take away the unpleasing taste of last night. The engine overhaul was only finished last night, so we intended to up anchor this morning at daylight. Henriksen and I went ashore and waited for the Consul about some affairs at Robert’s Café, a large, quiet café, with wide-open doors facing the sea. As we sat there rather silently, away in the velvety blue night, out to sea beyond the breakwater, several rockets rose and burst in a golden shower and we heard the continuous blast of a ship’s horn making signals of distress. We jumped! so did the other two or three cigarette-smoking habitués of the café, and all got on to the sea-front, and the horn continued.
“That’s a wreck,” said Henriksen.
“Yes,” said I.
“Wat we do?” said Henriksen.
I paused for half-a-second—I couldn’t advise—Henriksen is in command.
So I waited for this fraction of a second—it felt like a whole minute.
He thought and must have thought hard; for there are many things to put together in such a moment—owners’ risks, personal risk, honour, risk of fines or imprisonment for leaving a Portuguese port without clearance, the chance of saving lives; and last and least—salvage.
“Yes,” said Henriksen, “we goes help—we’s British ship!” and we turned and ran; he blew on his whistle as we ran, and our engineer and some of the crew, who had just come on shore and were entering a café along the promenade, recognised the whistle, and before we were up to them they were back into our boat and we jumped in and pulled off. We got on board, slipped our anchor and chain, marked with line and lifebelt for a buoy, got out side lights and started the engine, and were round the outer end of the breakwater within thirty minutes from the moment we left the café! and I say we felt proud of St Ebba. The big town clock on the church was striking eleven P.M.
No other vessel in harbour was under steam so we congratulated ourselves on having a motor-engine and so being able to get under way so rapidly.
The Arcades at the Inner Harbour, Ponta Delgada, Azores
Tunny on the Beach at Madeira
Till we came to the end of the breakwater, the distress foghorn signals continued. As we swung round it they ceased!
Out to sea for a mile or so we steered, looking vainly for lights to the horizon and the S.W. and saw nothing. Then looked behind us, and there, on the most unlikely place in the world, were the lights of a ship, on the breakwater rocks, close to the fixed shore light!
Round we turned, going our best speed, and stopped when we had got as close as we thought advisable in the darkness, shoved over our flat dory and rowed off with a lantern in the bow.
The steamer was rolling gently on the rocks; we rowed close and the writer in the bow hailed them on board and offered a tow off into the harbour. The crew we could see, and they preserved silence for some time.
“Hullo!” we shouted. “On board there, were you sending up distress signals?” A reluctant “Yes” and “Who are you?” from the gloom on deck, where there was a little light that showed some Dutch courage going around. And we answered, and asked in turn: “Where’s your skipper?”
“Below with owners.”
“Well, tell him to speak”—pause—then came the skipper’s “Hullo! what do you want?”
“What do we want!” we repeat very angrily. “Weren’t you firing rockets and blowing yourself inside out with distress signals?”
No answer.
“Were those distress signals?” we ask again, and there’s a reluctant “Yes” and still another “What do you want and who are you?”
“We’re St Ebba, whaler, motor ship, two hundred horse-power, and tons of cable, come to tow you off into harbour—half-an-hour will do it—there’s an hour of flood yet and you can float that distance.”
A long silence.... Then: “We don’t want help—you’ve come along for salvage.” I was dumbfounded.
I need not prolong the interview; the crew said they’d like to be taken off, they’d got their bags ready, but their skipper wouldn’t let them.
The lamp showed her name on the stern in fresh gold letters—the B—enido, London—we knew a little about her, for a neighbouring steamer’s engineer had been asked on board for engine trouble; and only a few hours before the rockets went up he’d been speaking to us about her. He said she was a new ship (two thousand tons?), Spanish-owned with British captain, on her first voyage, engines made on Continent, hull in England, and she was all wrong.
She had left the harbour only a few hours before she was wrecked. The skipper set the course S.W., and a one-eyed nigger at the wheel steered N.E.
So we pulled back to the ship and told Henriksen of our abortive interview and he went off again with me and two men.
It would be pretty hard to put into words our very natural keenness and the wrath at the unaccountable apathy of the British captain of the Spanish-owned ship. But the result of the second interview was the same as first. They were going to cling to the rocks—we were to mind our own business.
We thought we ought to stand by all night for the sake of the crew on board her, for I’ve seen a vessel go on to rocks in a similar position and lie comfortably till the tide turned, and when the water receded heel right over and go straight down in a second.
When daylight came her stern had sunk till the deck was level with the water and lighters were coming off to take some of her cargo. We could have towed her off at first without much trouble and long before her plates were seriously damaged by the continuous rolling that followed and the falling of the tide.