Killers Attacking a Finner Whale
Possibly this stylo sketch in sketch-book may be a sufficient description of the Seven Cities. Imagine two green absinth-coloured lakes, green foliage, and a few white houses at the bottom of a crater; with this sketch you have the scene, and you can fancy the charm of the fresh, keen air up the mountains combined with Sancho’s great ham sandwich and tinto, but heaven fend the reader from the pain of a wooden saddle on a donkey riding down such a hill again.
The road home was wearisome to a degree, hundreds of local squires or farmers, and everyone lifting hats, but why? Who knows? The effort to respond was quite ridiculous. Someone should invent an automatic hat-lifter for royalties, Norwegians, and natives of the Azores. Groups of women were on either side of the road shelling yellow maize, sitting like Indians; and at last and at length we got into Delgada, having had more than enough of cultivated maize lanes and lava dykes.
Then to Portuguese shipping agents and to business accounts, not a pleasing part of whaling. It is difficult to settle our affairs, on leaving port. For instance, the harbour trustees, or whatever they are called here, wanted to charge for the morning’s incoming pilotage after we had gone out to save a wreck, but we barred that. “You old mens sleeps here ashore,” said Henriksen. “We’s go out, slips anchor—dark night—risks our ship, you charges us! might have been Titanic and we save thousands’ lives. You say you haves many tow-boats! why nones go out? What about insurance, heh?” They quietly dropped the subject.
But now it’s time to go and put aside the above reflections and disappointments so far; we have hope, and months, possibly years, and certainly long seas in front of us, to gain or to lose in.
So we up anchor at night with a light air from the east, and several weeks’ sailing in front of us to Madeira and Cape Town, and whales on the road, we hope.
CHAPTER XX
Farewell, Ponta Delgada, with your pretty streets perfumed with fir planks and pineapples; farewell, San Miguel. How sweetly the delicate tints of your capital—pale pink and blue—show in this early sunlight.