they needed it. The group on the pier was a rusty one—men and
women, and boys and girls, all ragged and barefoot, un-combed and
unclean, and by instinct, education, and profession, beggars. They
trooped after us, and never more, while we tarried in Fayal, did we
get rid of them. We walked up the middle of the principal street, and
these vermin surrounded us on all sides, and glared upon us; and
every moment excited couples shot ahead of the procession to get a
good look back, just as village boys do when they accompany the
elephant on his advertising trip from street to street. It was very
flattering to me to be part of the material for such a sensation Here
and there in the doorways we saw women, with fashionable
Portuguese hoods on. This hood is of thick blue cloth, attached to a
cloak of the same stuff, and is a marvel of ugliness. It stands up high,
and spreads far abroad, and is unfathomably deep. It fits like a circus
tent, and a woman's head is hidden away in it like the man's who
prompts the singers from his tin shed in the stage of an opera. There
is no particle of trimming about this monstrous capote, as they call
it—it is just a plain, ugly dead-blue mass of sail, and a woman can't
go within eight points of the wind with one of them on; she has to go
before the wind or not at all. The general style of the capote is the
same in all the islands, and will remain so for the next ten thousand
years, but each island shapes its capotes just enough differently from
the others to enable an observer to tell at a glance what particular
island a lady hails from. The Portuguese pennies or reis (pronounced
rays) are prodigious. It takes one thousand reis to make a dollar, and
all financial estimates are made in reis. We did not know this until
after we had found it out through Blucher. Blucher said he was so
happy to be on solid land once more that he wanted to give a
feast—said he had heard it was a cheap land, and he was bound to
have a grand banquet. He invited nine of us, and we ate an excellent
dinner at the principal hotel. In the midst of the jollity produced by
good cigars, good wine, and passable anecdotes, the landlord
presented his bill. Blucher glanced at it and his countenance fell. He
took another look to assure himself that his senses had not deceived
him, and then read the items aloud, in a faltering voice, while the
roses in his cheeks turned to ashes:
" 'Ten dinners, at 600 reis, 6,000 reis!' Ruin and desolation!"
" 'Twenty-five cigars, at 100 reis, 2,500 reis!' Oh, my sainted
mother!"
" 'Eleven bottles of wine, at 1,200 reis, 13,200 reis!' Be with us all!"
" 'TOTAL, TWENTY-ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED
REIS!' The suffering Moses !—there ain't money enough in the ship
to pay that bill! Go—leave me to my misery, boys, I am a ruined
community."
I think it was the blankest looking party I ever saw. Nobody could
say a word. It was as if every soul had been stricken dumb. Wine
glasses descended slowly to the table, their contents untasted. Cigars
dropped unnoticed from nerveless fingers. Each man sought his
neighbor's eye, but found in it no ray of hope, no encouragement. At
last the fearful silence was broken. The shadow of a desperate
resolve settled upon Blucher's countenance like a cloud, and he rose
up and said:
"Landlord, this is a low, mean swindle, and I'll never, never stand it.
Here's a hundred and fifty dollars, sir, and it's all you'll get—I'll
swim in blood, before I'll pay a cent more."
Our spirits rose and the landlord's fell—at least we thought so; he
was confused at any rate, not withstanding he had not understood a
word that had been said. He glanced from the little pile of gold
pieces to Blucher several times, and then went out. He must have
visited an American, for, when he returned, he brought back his bill
translated into a page that a Christian could understand - thus:
10 dinners, 6,000 reis or.................$6.00
25 cigars, 2,500 reis or...................$2.50
11 bottles wine, 13,200 reis or.......$13.20
Total 21,700 reis, or.......................$21.70
Happiness reigned once more in Blucher's dinner party. More
refreshments were ordered.
I think the Azores must be very little known in America. Out of our
whole ship's company there was not a solitary individual who knew
anything whatever about them. Some of the party, well read
concerning most other lands, had no other information about the
Azores than that they were a group of nine or ten small islands far
out in the Atlantic, something more than half way between New York
and Gibraltar. That was all. These considerations move me to put in a
paragraph of dry facts just here.
The community is eminently Portuguese—that is to say, it is slow, poor,
shiftless, sleepy, and lazy. There is a civil governor, appointed by the
King of Portugal; and also a military governor, who can assume supreme
control and suspend the civil government at his pleasure. The islands
contain a population of about 200,000, almost entirely Portuguese.
Everything is staid and settled, for the country was one hundred years
old when Columbus discovered America. The principal crop is corn and
they raise it and grind it just as their great-great grandfathers did. They
plow with a board slightly shod with iron; their trifling little harrows are
drawn by men and women; small windmills grind the corn, ten bushels a
day, and there is one assistant superintendent to feed the mill and a
general superintendent to stand by and keep him from going to sleep.
When the wind changes they hitch on some donkeys, and actually turn
the whole upper half of the mill around until the sails are in proper
position, instead of fixing the concern so that the sails could be moved
instead of the mill. Oxen tread the wheat from the ear, after the fashion
prevalent in the time of Methuselah. There is not a wheelbarrow in the
land—they carry everything on their heads, or on donkeys, or in a
wicker—bodied cart, whose wheels are solid blocks of wood and whose
axles turn with the wheel. There is not a modern plow in the islands, or a
threshing-machine. All attempts to introduce them have failed. The
Portuguese crossed himself and prayed God to shield him from all
blasphemous desire to know more than his father did before him. The
climate is mild; they never have snow or ice, and I saw no chimneys in
the town. The donkeys and the men, women, and children of a family, all
eat and sleep in the same room, and are unclean, are ravaged by vermin,
and are truly happy. The people lie, and cheat the stranger, and are
desperately ignorant, and have hardly any reverence for their dead. The
latter trait shows how little better they are than the donkeys they eat and
sleep with. The only well-dressed Portuguese in the camp are the half a
dozen well-to-do families; the Jesuit priests, and the soldiers of the little
garrison. The wages of a laborer are twenty to twenty-four cents a day,
and those of a good mechanic about twice as much. They count it in reis
at a thousand to the dollar, and this makes them rich and contented. Fine
grapes used to grow in the islands, and an excellent wine was made and
exported. But a disease killed all the vines fifteen years ago, and since
that time no wine has been made. The islands being wholly of volcanic
origin, the soil is necessarily very rich. Nearly every foot of ground is
under cultivation, and two or three crops a year of each article are
produced, but nothing is exported save a few oranges - chiefly to
England. Nobody comes here, and nobody goes away. News is a thing
unknown in Fayal. A thirst for it is a passion equally unknown. A
Portuguese of average intelligence inquired if our civil war was over?
because, he said, somebody had told him it was - or, at least, it ran in his
mind, that somebody had told him something like that! And when a
passenger gave an officer of the garrison copies of the Tribune, the
Herald, and Times, he was surprised to find later news in them from
Lisbon than he had just received by the little monthly steamer. He was
told that it came by cable. He said he knew they had tried to lay a cable
ten years ago, but it had been in his mind, somehow, that they hadn't
succeeded!
It is in communities like this that Jesuit humbuggery flourishes. We
visited a Jesuit cathedral nearly two hundred years old, and found in it a
piece of the veritable cross upon which our Saviour was crucified. It was
polished and hard, and in as excellent a state of preservation as if the
dread tragedy on Calvary had occurred yesterday instead of eighteen
centuries ago. But these confiding people believe in that piece of wood
unhesitatingly.
In a chapel of the cathedral is an altar with facings of solid silver - at
least, they call it so, and I think myself it would go a couple of hundred
to the ton (to speak after the fashion of the silver miners), and before it is
kept forever burning a small lamp. A devout lady who died, left money
and contracted for unlimited masses for the repose of her soul, and also
stipulated that this lamp should be kept lighted always, day and night.
She did all this before she died, you understand. It is a very, very small
lamp, and a very dim one, and it could not work her much damage, I
think, if it went out altogether.
The great altar of the cathedral, and also three or four minor ones, are a
perfect mass of gilt gimcracks and gingerbread. And they have a swarm
of rusty, dusty, battered apostles standing around the filigree some on
one leg and some with one eye out, but a gamey look in the other, and
some with two or three fingers gone, and some with not enough nose left
to blow - all of them crippled and discouraged, and fitter subjects for the
hospital than the cathedral.
The walls of the chancel are of porcelain, all pictured over with figures
of almost life size, very elegantly wrought, and dressed in the fanciful
costumes of two centuries ago. The design was a history of something or