Porto Grande, or St. Vincent, our next island, possesses an excellent harbor, of great size. Here we found a steamer coaling for China, and another for Java. The English have large coal yards here, and the iron launches and little tug steamers give every dispatch, quite like England. The contrast between the energy of the races could be seen at a glance.
As I apprehended, the strong head winds, which we could not resist, have carried us to the west, and we found ourselves short of coal, and our supplies so much reduced that we made for the Azores. It is, however, worth the delay of a few days to visit this beautiful and highly cultivated island. Its population is dense, and exceedingly industrious. The town of Punta Delgada contains twelve thousand inhabitants, is well built of stone, its streets well paved, is favorably situated in a rainy latitude, and produces most exuberantly. The exportation of oranges to England keeps a large number of vessels employed during the fruit season. The Quintas, or estates of the nobility which I have visited, are magnificent, and would not disgrace the parks and gardens of some of the small princes of Europe. The immense variety of flowers in bloom, the fountains of water, the close cultivation to the very summit of the hills upon this isolated spot, and the general amount of production rather took us by surprise, particularly as our last port, St. Vincent, was entirely barren, with scarcely a sign of vegetation; and the time before, when we touched there on our way to Brazil, some years since, we landed famine supplies, as half the population had died from starvation.
Our prospects now are for an early arrival in Lisbon, and I hope in the course of five or six days to be in direct correspondence with Europe and America, and shall rejoice in having accomplished a long and perilous African trip, without any desire to repeat the same.
THE END.
Transcriber’s Notes:
1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been corrected silently.
2. Some hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have been retained as in the original.