We pass the fishing village of Camara da Lobos (place of the seals), several miles to starboard. It nestles round the head of a bay—the deep glen behind it in shadow, the white houses in moonlight—a few yellow lights move about, our crew live there.
Under the cliff of Cabo Girao we closed our eyes for, it seemed, a minute, and opened them to find a change. The sadness of night was gone and it was all hilarious blue day.
How quickly the night goes, even in the sub-tropics; as fast as it falls, almost in a minute, the moon’s sheen on the swell is gone, and the glorious sun shines again, from behind us over the east end of Madeira. Due west there is a lapis lazuli blue sky over a bank of pink cumuli, the full, golden moon seems to stay one moment in the blue before it sets behind the bank of cloud; then all the sea and sky is the blue of the tropics again, as it was yesterday and the day before—great swells of a rippling blue sea, and a blue sky, and that is all, excepting our little selves and our green, red and yellow boat in the immensity.
The features of our crew are now clear to us, and they unwind the cloths they wore round their heads for protection against the moonlight and night air. Alas, “41” still tries to sleep, and so does the interpreter; I fear the motion is the cause—the rise and send of a small boat in the Atlantic is very trying. Ahead of us there is one sail like our own; we see it now and then as it rises on a blue swell; now the top of the white sail catches the golden light of the sunrise, then far away beyond it something, a mere speck, appears for an instant, then another, there are boats out there fishing; it comes quite as a surprise to find fellow-creatures out so far from shore in small craft. We cannot count them, for we only see three or four at a time, as they appear in turn on the top of the swell. Now the sail in front drops, and the boat is like the others, with the mast down, and oars out, and little figures standing out silhouetted against the sky for a second, then lost to sight. In another ten minutes we have joined the fleet, and dip our sail and stow our mast away.
A Sleeping Bear and Cubs
And the colour of these mariners! We can hardly begin to fish, so great is our desire to gloat on the appearance of each boat—its weathered brilliant colours and its crew as it appears in its turn over the back of a blue glittering swell. Camara da Lobos men all wear wide straw hats, with a broad black ribbon round them, so their brown faces are in shadow; their shirts, originally white, are tinted like old ivory by many washings and voyages, so were their cotton trousers, and tattered and patched most wonderfully. The boats are striped yellow and blue, with perhaps magenta, and blue oars; coarse enough colours they would look under a northern sun, but here, with the complementary tints from the strong light, and all repeated by reflections in the blue sea, they become a sight to rejoice anyone with half an eye. The fishing, however, soon engrossed our attention.
As a preliminary to tunny-fishing you have to catch large mackerel as bait and smaller mackerel to throw out into the sea when the tunny comes along in order to keep them in your neighbourhood. For the small fry we fished with a yard of cane and a yard of line and a small hook baited with little cubes of mackerel. The captain chopped up some of these into a fine paste on a board with a machete and put the paste into the water to draw more fish; as it faded away down into the clear green depths, swarms of these little fish, about four to the pound, dashed to and fro, eating it, and every now and then one would take our bait, when there was a flash of silver in the water, and out he came to join his neighbours in a bucket.
Another of our crew, “Bow,” we will call him, rigged a longer hand-line and fished deep, and soon pulled up some magnificent spotted mackerel. This bait-catching was apparently the object of the early morning start—large mackerel for bait for the tunny, and small fish to catch the mackerel. The small fish, when they are let loose, are supposed to hug the shadow of the boat and so keep the tunny in the neighbourhood: besides this purpose, they form our principal food at midday.
These large mackerel were kept alive alongside on tethers, hooked by the nose—with a rather clever rustic swivel on the line—kept alive to be used for the tunny. But usually a big basket is kept floating alongside, into which are put the live bait, large and small. There was so much going on; so many little fishing dodges new to me that I must have missed much; what held my attention were the great coils of strong hand-line, thirty fathoms in each, thick as the average man’s little finger, with brass-twisted wire trace, fifteen plies, each with thick iron hook at its end.