The jackaranda is the most amusingly pretty flowering tree. One morning you notice its bare indiarubber-like leafless branches, a few days after the bare branches are covered all over with bunches of Neapolitan violets—at least, they look exactly like them, and a day or two later the street is carpeted with the fallen blossoms and the golden brown oxen of the carros[12] go wading through them, leaving dark tracks where the little polished pebbles of the cobbled road show through the violet.
I tried tunny-fishing off Madeira on several occasions. Perhaps this is a subject more suitable to introduce in a whaler’s log than descriptions of flowers and canaries.
On one occasion I persuaded a hotel visitor to accompany me, with a crew of Portuguese.
The tunny, or tuna, is a mackerel; there are several kinds. Those I saw ran from about twenty pounds to three hundred pounds.
You have to start before daybreak for the fishing from Madeira, which is apt to put off intending tunny-fishers, but “41,” as I shall call my friend at Reid’s Hotel, after the number of his room, agreed to risk the briny and an early rise—I doubt if he will do it again—blue Atlantic rollers and a sub-tropical sun are somewhat trying.
Here are notes from my sketch-book of our day’s proceedings, begun, I may inform the sympathetic reader, in the Palace Hotel before daylight.
... All is still—it is only three hours past midnight, the people in this caravanserai are all asleep—we alone are awake in the great empty dining-room—the night waiter and the writer—the writer cross and thirsting for an early cup of tea—the night porter does not understand this, but—he comes from Las Palmas, that is all I can learn from him. He is limp of figure and has black eyes and hair and his sallow face only expresses dull resignation and an unfulfilled desire for sleep in a corner: he is young, but I think no smile has ever passed over his chilly countenance in this life. He does not even move a feature or express the least remorse when I tell him it was No. 41, not 49, he should have awakened—fancy “49’s” feelings! so, to make sure, we go together and pull out No. 41—“41,” in pyjamas, and red-eyed, seems to have forgotten altogether that he was to go fishing with me. Fishing at ten P.M., with a pipe and a grog, and fishing at three in the morning are so different! So the writer and the mirthless waiter sit down again in the vast empty dining-room and wait whilst “41” gets into his clothes.... Now we are ready—an hour later than the end of above paragraph, but still tea-less. My fishermen and interpreter have been waiting under the palms in front of the hotel, smoking cigarettes and talking quietly and with interest, even at this dark hour of morning. We give them our thermos flasks, with only cold coffee in them, and our provisions for two days, in baskets, and with them we steal into the night round the hotel gardens and terraces, trimmed with tenantless wicker-work chairs, under the palms, pale in the faint moonlight, down the steps, over the cliffs with care, through an iron gate, we must look like conspirators, but we only feel sleepless; down and down, till we come to the bathing steps and dimly discern our boat and men rising and falling in the grey foam. We embark with difficulty, with our provisions, and row off. The moon in the west breaks a little through the clouds and cheers us with its broken reflections on the long swell. “41” is in the stern, the writer in the bow, four rowers and the interpreter between us.
We pass under the cliffs to the west of Funchal Bay, rowing steadily with two long sweeps, two men to a sweep, close to the surf on the rocks, and pass a blow-hole in the rocks, where the rising surge makes a fountain of fine spray through a hole in the rocks, very like a whale’s blast. It is blowing intermittently, dimly seen in the moonlight. As we pass the outstanding rocky island opposite it we catch a faint land breeze and step our mast and set the mainsail and slip along in absolute silence.
It is a long sail, we have nearly twenty miles before we get to the place the tunny frequent.