CHAPTER XI CORVO, OUR NEAREST EUROPEAN NEIGHBOR Far at sea from Portugal, straggling in a long northwestward line toward America, lies the archipelago sometimes called the Islands of the Sun or the Western Islands but now generally known as the Azores. That line breaks into three divisions sepa- rated by wide gaps of sea: the most easterly pair, St. Michael and St. Mary; the main cluster of five islands, Pico being the loftiest and Terceira the most important; and the northwesterly pair, Flores and Corvo. These last make a little far-severed world of their own, sharing in none of the tremors and upheavals which from time to time more or less transform parts of the other two divisions. The remote origin of the pair was volcanic, and Corvo is little more now than an old crater lifted about 300 feet above the surface; but the fires have long been dead, and in historic times the lower strata have never shifted suddenly to produce any great earthquake. There have been changes, but they must be attributed for the most part to gradual subsidence. These two islands, though almost as near to Newfoundland as to any point in Portugal, cannot be classed as American; yet Corvo in particular seems to have impressed the imagination of ancient and medieval explorers with a sense of some special rela- tion to regions beyond, though possibly only to the entangling Sargasso Sea of weeds, which would lie next in order south- westward (Fig. i), and the menacing mysteries of the remoter wastes of the Atlantic. It may have been felt as the last stepping stone for the leap into the great unknown. ORIGIN OF THE NAME Flores, the island of flowers, thus prettily renamed by the Portuguese, is referred to as the rabbit island, Li Conigi, in the
