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Updated: June 24, 2025
In the mean time the king changing his mind, sent orders for the commercial ships to remain in the Indies, and for Don Alonso Baçan to return to Corunna, which he did accordingly, never once coming near the Azores except the two ships already mentioned; for he well knew that the English lay near Corvo, but would not visit them, and so returned to Corunna.
My own letters posted at Horta reached the United States six days behind my letter from Gibraltar, mailed thirteen days later. The day after my arrival at Horta was the feast of a great saint. Boats loaded with people came from other islands to celebrate at Horta, the capital, or Jerusalem, of the Azores. The deck of the Spray was crowded from morning till night with men, women, and children.
The 3d we sent off our pinnace, which was about 24 tons burden, together with the small caravel we had taken off the Burlings, to range about the anchorages of the Azores, trying to make captures of any thing they could find, appointing them to meet with us at a rendezvous 12 leagues W.S.W. from Fayal.
"Besides, my grandfather used to own this. They know me. Forty years ago old Silva come from the Azores. Went sheep-herdin' in the mountains for a couple of years, then blew in to San Leandro. These five acres was the first land he leased. That was the beginnin'. Then he began leasin' by the hundreds of acres, an' by the hundred-an'-sixties.
The Portuguese discoveries of the 15th Century carried the plant to the Azores, the Cape Verde islands, and to possessions in the Gulf of Guinea. The Spaniards took it to the Western Hemisphere in the early years of the 16th Century. The Portuguese took it to Brazil at about the same time.
We had played billiards in the Azores with balls that were not round and on an ancient table that was very little smoother than a brick pavement one of those wretched old things with dead cushions, and with patches in the faded cloth and invisible obstructions that made the balls describe the most astonishing and unsuspected angles and perform feats in the way of unlooked-for and almost impossible "scratches" that were perfectly bewildering.
A few days later Bert's ship lost her rudder and mainmast in a gale. The crew ran out of food and subsisted on fish. They saw strange air-ships going eastward near the Azores and landed to get provisions and repair the rudder at Teneriffe. There they found the town destroyed and two big liners, with dead still aboard, sunken in the harbour.
The island was shaken by an earthquake and bombarded with showers of cinders and stones, which set houses on fire and killed many of the natives. For nearly two years before this explosion earthquakes had been common, and sea and land had been agitated from the valley of the Mississippi to the coasts of Venezuela and the mountains of New Grenada, and from the Azores to the West Indies.
On the meridian of the islands of Corvo and Flores, the most western of the group of the Azores, the breadth of the current is 160 leagues. When vessels, on their return from South America to Europe, endeavour to make these two islands to rectify their longitude, they are always sensible of the motion of the waters to south-east.
The English crews were partly ashore at the Azores; and Howard had barely time to bring them off, cut his cables, and work to windward of the overwhelming Spaniards. Grenville's men were last. The Revenge had only 'her hundred fighters on deck and her ninety sick below' when the Spanish fleet closed round him.
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