THE HISTORY OF WHALING IN THE AZORES 299 



bitter and dangerous rivalry (p. 334). Recently there has been a trend towards amalgamation, as when 

 three companies merged as Cais do Pico in 1946 to build a modern station, but even in 1949 Pico stood 

 out from other islands in having an average of three times as many companies as there were settle- 

 ments or stations (Table 4). Whaling, and the associated crafts of the boat-builder, blacksmith and 

 cooper, are among the major occupations of the Pico islanders today. Confined by their sheer moun- 

 tain to struggle for their livelihood upon its lower slopes and upon the coastal strip, the strong Pico 

 men have long been used to simplicity and hardihood, qualities which have helped them to their 

 special reputation among the Azoreans for unflagging effort and resolute daring in the whaleboats. 

 With them above all the whaling tradition of the Azores is secure. 



Flores, Terceira and San Miguel (Fig. 3), the islands other than Fayal frequented in the nineteenth 

 century by whaleships, probably followed after no great lapse of time the shore whaling venture of 

 Fayal in the 1850's. But I cannot find any details. A likely time for the start of shore whaling from 

 San Miguel was the period during the 1870's when Ponta Delgada temporarily competed with Horta 

 as the entrepot for the American whale oil and provision trade. The whalery was set up at Capellas on 

 the north coast, and it is still the principal whaleboat station although the try- works are now disused. 

 The station was evidently in existence some years before 1890 when Pouchet and Chaves examined 

 a Sperm whale taken from San Miguel. Whaling flourished in the island, for a comparatively larger 

 number of whales frequents this locality than the seas of the Central and Western groups. Like Fayal, 

 although not to the same extent as Pico, the island has maintained whaling on some sort of scale no 

 matter how small, even during the several periods of acute depression which have made whaling 

 everywhere in the world since the i87o's and 1880's an industry of extraordinarily fluctuating fortunes. 

 Whaling in Terceira, with a whaleboat station at San Mateus and try-works at Negrito hard by, 

 started earlier than 1895, when the Prince of Monaco's yacht Princess Alice witnessed the killing of 

 a Sperm whale by Terceiran boats (Buchanan, 1896; Monaco, 1896; Richard, 1907). There was 

 another station on the north coast at Biscoites, but the whale fishery in Terceira does not seem to have 

 prospered in this century, and was for a long time defunct until revived when the last war began 

 (Fig. 4). To the westward, Flores, supplying recruits as well as fresh provisions to the deep-sea whaling, 

 has had an association with the whaleships as old as that of Fayal, although not so important. In 1862 

 many boatloads of whalemen landed in Flores : they were survivors of the tragedy of civil war and the 

 wholesale burning of Yankee whaleships by the Confederate cruiser Alabama (Semmes, 1869, p. 445). 

 These men were shipped back to the Federal States and it is very probable that they sold their 

 whaleboats locally before departure. I wonder if these boats were used to start the whaleries at Santa 

 Cruz and Lagens das Flores. We know from the statistics given by Faria e Silva (1890) that there was 

 certainly whaling from Flores by 1886, but it seems to have fared little better in Terceira for the first 

 three decades of this century. 



In the remaining four islands of the archipelago there have been whaleries at least since the late 

 nineteenth century, but they have been conducted (until the beginning of the last war) more or less 

 intermittently and on quite a small scale. This is apparent from the island catch graphs in Fig. 4. 

 Corvo was whaling at least as early as 1886. Smallest and most remote of the Azores and lying 1 2 miles 

 north of Flores, this island maintained between six and eleven whaleboats in the decade following 

 1895, yet only one whale was caught during that time (Table 10), and subsequently whaling from the 

 single landing place at Rosario has been abandoned. The small and poor community could not afford 

 to maintain such an unproductive fishery. No doubt the Corvo whalemen were defeated, not by a 

 shortage of whales, but by the surf, which, beating everywhere about this unsheltered island, must 

 have made their peremptory embarkations often perilous and sometimes impossible, and have equally 

 endangered the subsequent beaching of the whaleboats and the proper stranding and cutting in of the 



