Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/45

INHABITANTS OF THE AZORES. 29 Efforts have also been made to re-plant the waste spaces and higher slopes of the mountains. In this way the whole of San-Miguel has become a garden of acclimatisation, in which a thousand arborescent species have been naturalised, and in some cases multiplied prodigiously. Amongst the most valuable forest-trees thus introduced are the marine fir, the Japanese cryptomeria, the eucalyptus, acacia, cypress, and oak. Fauna. The indigenous fauna is much poorer than the flora of the Azores. On the first arrival of the Europeans it comprised no vertebiates except birds, although some writers speak of a bat found also in North Europe. But this animal was perhaps introduced from Flanders by the Belgian settlers in the sixteenth century. From Europe also came the rabbit, the ferret, the weasel, the black rat that nests in trees, the grey rat, and mouse Of birds there are about thirty species, some remaining throughout the year, some migrating, but nearly all common to Europe, or at least the Atlantic. The green canary was formerly very common, but has been proscribed as a great destroyer of corn. The bird whence the archipelago takes its name of the Azores, or " Hawk " Islands, appears not to be a hawk at all, but a species of buzzard. There are no reptiles, except two species of lizard found in Graciosa, where they are recent arrivals, perhaps from Madeira. The frog, also a stranger, has multiplied rapidly, while the toad, brought from the United States, has failed to become acclimatised. The African locusts have occasionally alighted in swarms and devoured the crops. There are fresh- water eels, but no river molluscs, although as many as sixty-nine species of land molluscs have been found, nearly half of which occur nowhere else. They represent, with six varieties of coleoptera, nearly all the primitive Azorian fauna. Even marine shells are extremely rare, and in some places one may walk for miles along the beach without meeting with a single specimen. The deep-sea fauna is represented chiefly by the cetaceans, porpoise, dolphin, spermaceti and Physeter 7nacroccphahis, the last named formerly very numerous, and of which about a hundred and fifty are still annually captured by the American whalers. Inhabitants. When first visited by the Italian and Portuguese navigators, the Azores were found to be uninhabited. The pioneers of the colony founded in 1444 by Gon^alo Velho Cabral on San-Miguel were some " Moors," sent forward, so to say, to test the climate and resources of the country for the Portuguese who were to follow them. Afterwards the large owners of feudal estates introduced with the white peasantry a certain number of black slaves, by whom a slight strain of dark blood was transmitted to the other settlers. The Jews expelled from Portugal at the beginning of the sixteenth century w^ere also condemned to slavery and distributed over various districts in San-Miguel. Some thousand Flemish colonists introduced into the central group by Jobst van Huerter gave the name of " Flemish Islands '*