never more, while we tarried in Fayal, did we get rid of them. We walked up the middle of the principal street, and these vermin surrounded us on all sides, and glared upon us; and every moment excited couples shot ahead of the procession to get a good look back, just as village boys do when they accompany the elephant on his advertising trip from street to street. The community is eminently Portuguese — that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy. There is a civil governor, appointed by the King of Portugal; and also a military governor, who can assume supreme control and suspend the civil government at his pleasure. [...] there is one assistant superintendent to feed the mill and a general superintendent to stand by and keep him from going to sleep...There is not a wheelbarrow in the land [...] There is not a modern plow in the islands, or a threshing-machine. All attempts to introduce them have failed. The good Catholic Portuguese crossed himself and prayed God to shield him from all blasphemous desire to know more than his father did before him. [...] The people lie, and cheat the stranger, and are desperately ignorant, and have hardly any reverence for their dead. The latter trait shows how little better they are than the donkeys they eat and sleep with. Joshua Slocum, sailing the sloop Spray, stopped in Horta on the first leg of his solo global circumnavigation, which he chronicled in his 1899 book Sailing Alone Around the World. Jules Verne mentioned Horta in his fictional tales. In works by Portuguese writers Vitorino Nemésio (O Corsário das Ilhas) and Raul Brandão (As ilhas Desconhecidas), Faial is a focus of the story. Notable citizens Manuel de Arriaga (1840-1917), the first President of Portugal Euclides Rosa (Horta, Azores; c.1910 - São Paulo, Brazil c. 1979), engineer and artist, who worked for one of the early telegraph cable companies at the turn of the century, until 1946, when he abandoned his job to become an artist. Recognized as the Mestre do "Miolo de Figueira" (Master of Fig Tree Pith) he was acclaimed for his complex and elaborate sculptures of pith/wood, with a permanent collection in the Museum of Horta (donated in 1980). References Sources Municipalities of the Azores Marinas in the Azores