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.