Peasant Life in the Furnas, 1880s
The Furnas village is far more picturesque than any we have seen. The streets are narrower, and so hard trodden, that the peasants use them for a threshing-floor.
From: 1882 C.E. To: 1882 C.E.
Location: Furnas, São Miguel, Azores
From A Summer in the Azores, with a glimpse of Madeira by Charlotte Alice Baker, 1882.
The Furnas village is far more picturesque than any we have seen. The streets are narrower, and so hard trodden, that the peasants use them for a threshing-floor. As we ride through them, our donkeys pick their way carefully between heaps of lupine which the men are threshing with flails before their doors. In the first book of the Georgics, Virgil impresses upon the Italians the necessity of a rotation of crops, to preserve the soil from exhaustion, and especially urges the alternation of a light leguminous crop with the heavier grain crops.
"Changing the season," he says, "you will sow the golden corn on that soil from which you shall have first gathered the merry pulse with rattling pod, or the tiny seeds of the vetch, and the brittle stalks and rustling forest of the bitter lupine." This good advice was so well followed by the Romans that they carried the lupine with them into their conquered provinces; and through-out the Azores, to this day, the leguminous crop alternates with the grain crop. When about three feet high, the lupine is cut with a sort of two-edged sword, and the stubble is ploughed in for a fertilizer. The bean of the lupine is very bitter. The Furnas peasants carry bags of them down to the sea; and, after they are pickled by lying for a few days in the salt water, they are sold at the street-corners as one of the delicacies of the Lenten season.
At every turn of the road are gushing fountains, and beside them women in fantastic costumes, filling their antique water-jars. Where the river runs under the bridge, groups of them are always washing. Often we meet little children—a girl with her soiled apron, or a boy singing and swinging his dirty shirt—on their way to the river. Follow them, and you will see them scrub away at their little duds as deftly as their mothers.
The houses are all of stone, one story, with high thatched roofs. They stand close upon the street, with no yards in front, each projecting a little beyond its neighbor. One small square window, swinging inward, is placed high up in the front wall, and never closed but at night.
The front door always stands invitingly open; and, even if the lower half be shut, the top panel, which is on hinges, is flung wide open into the room. Such fascinating pictures as we often see framed in these half-open doors! here a Rembrandt, there a Rubens; an old man in his shirt-sleeves, resting his arms on the casement, stolidly smoking, his silvery hair straggling from under his gay knit cap; or a bright red handkerchief, crossed on a woman's breast, lights up the dark background, the leathery wrinkled old face contrasting sharply with the spotless white of the turbaned head, leaning meditatively on one hand. There are Murillos too, but of a less attractive sort, hardly to be mentioned to ears polite.
The interior consists of one room with floor of earth, strewn with rushes or pine-needles. Its furniture,—two beds, touching foot to foot, and occupying one end of the room; two Eastlake chairs, that would fill the heart of the modern decorator with envy; a deep stone window-seat under the high window; a niche in the opposite wall, usually containing a bambino; and a table.
The beds are made up high, with ticks of home-made linen, filled with husks, moss, or a soft, silky fibre gathered from the rootstock of the Bicksonia culcita, a fern very abundant here; a hard round bolster, and no pillows. When the family is too numerous to stow away in the two beds, others are made up under them, and trundled out at night. A loft is also made in the peak of the roof for the big boys, by swinging a floor of boards half across the living-room, above the other beds. Often one may see the men of the family taking here their noonday rest while below
"The wife, solacing with song her tedious labor, runs
through the webs with her shrill sounding shuttle."
Wandering from house to house in the valley of the Furnas, we easily forget we are living in the middle of the nineteenth century, so primitive are the occupations of the people.
"Some in querns
Ground small the yellow grain;
Some wove the web
Or twirled the spindle, sitting, with a quick
Light motion like the aspen's glancing leaves;"
Or held
"The distaff wrapped in wool
Of color like the violet."
One dries his corn in the capacious oven, or
"Weaves the pliant basket of bramble twigs,"
or slowly rears his wattle fence of the yielding cane. One flits from hearth to hearth with a potsherd of live coals.
Others bear on their heads great bundles of flax from the fields; while others again bruise, hackle, spin, and wind it ready for the loom. Few are idle. Their patient toil and their simple lives are full of lessons for us. They show us how circumscribed is the limit of the actual necessities of life, and our own extravagance and wastefulness as individuals and as a nation. Many of them never look over the walls of the crater in which they were born. They work from sunrise to sunset for about a shilling a day.
Their food is corn-bread and a drink of spring-water, with now and then a few bitter beans and a bit of dry fish as luxuries. They have no barns nor storehouses; for there is no grass to cut, the corn is housed with the family, and the hens and pigeons roost among the thatch. Most of them own neither field nor cart, nor ox nor horse, nor donkey nor cow nor goat. They have neither tea nor coffee, and seldom taste a drop of milk.
At Christmas-tide they have good cheer; for every man who can afford to keep one kills his pig, and exchanges with his neighbors.
The peasant of the Furnas valley utilizes every thing that grows. He feeds his porca on the wild lettuce, the brake, and the yam-leaf. He braids the reed into ropes, plaits it into matting, or uses it and the pine-leaf to carpet his floor. Of its pith he makes artificial flowers. Of the bramble and the willow he weaves his baskets which serve him as well for cart, and wheelbarrow, and fanning-mill. The bamboo he uses for his staff, his fence, and his rafters. His roof and his hat are of straw. The flax supplies most of his clothing. His dye-stuffs are the weeds of the hillside.
The volcano furnishes the stone, for his dwelling; the brook, the clay for his pottery. He makes his bed of moss, or husks, or fern-silk. The Faya and the heather give him his fuel. His greatest ambition is to become the possessor of an American lamp, clock, or umbrella.
One of the drollest of their customs is that of attaching nicknames which in time supersede the real name of the person. The most trivial incident supplies the nickname. For instance, the real name of the father of Anton, one of our donkey-men, was Pereire; but at a pig-killing, an occasion of great merriment, he got the appen- dage of Ribica, or Pigtail, to his name. Hence
Anton is called Anton Ribica; and were he to be spoken of as Anton Pereire, no one would know who was meant. Our old Francisco is nicknamed Panela, or Saucepan; and his son Manuel, the soldier, is always soberly called Manuel Panela.
Anton is a very intelligent fellow. He would be called "smart" for a Yankee: for a Portuguese peasant, his energy, his promptness, his shrewdness, and his quick perception of character are remarkable. Our enthusiasm over every thing delights him. He contrasts it with the immobility of the "Ingles." He and the rest of the donkey-men are unwearied in their efforts to entertain us. We asked him one clay which he liked best,—Americans, or Portuguese. Of course he said Americans, and then threw us into convulsions of laughter by proceeding to explain the difference, and to give his reasons for his preference. He is a perfect mimic; and with unrivalled pantomime, and a few Portuguese words, he gave us the typical lady of both nations.
The senhora Americana sews, writes, reads French and German, and plays the piano; she travels; she likes the burro, and enjoys the buena vista.
The senhora Portuguese does nothing of all this. She reads nothing; she sits at home and fans herself; she "valsa, valsa, sempre valsa," and cares for nothing but “dança, dança, sempre dança." And, fanning himself violently with his hat, Anton waltzed down the road to show us how she did it.
Baker, Charlotte Alice. A Summer in the Azores, with a glimpse of Madeira, Lee and Shepard, 1882.
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