2021 TRAVEL WRITING COMPETITION WINNER

Prize: £1,000

Finalists:

“Let the Potsherd Strive” by Ian Vijay

“Lament for a Glacier” by Moira Ashley

“A Trick of the Night” by Meg Anderson

“Abune Yemanta” by Helen Dudley

“Pirates and Pearls” by Simon Rowe

“A Rendezvous with Depth” by Matt Fitzgerald

and the winner is…

Ian Vijay

Let the Potsherd Strive: A Story of Mid-Atlantic Megaliths

I

There’s a new statue of Vasco Da Gama at the seafront in Angra do Heroísmo. Even after three months on the island, I do a doubletake when I pass. It’s not oversized like most statues, and the little bronze figure looks like a living man, pensive, aggrieved as he strides across the square with his back to the sea.

When his brother was dying here, Da Gama paused his return from India to mourn, and stayed on for several months. The statue reminds us of the Azores’ place in the Portuguese myth; of the archipelago’s position as gateway to the world. It draws a thread from Lisbon through the Atlantic to Mozambique, Goa, Nagasaki and Malacca — a story of Portugal’s Discoveries, that start and end here.

But there is an unsettling buzz in Angra. And it’s not the launch of the island’s first McDonalds, on Avenida de Infante Dom Henrique — although this has generated much of its own excitement.

I’m talking about a piece of ceramic in an isolated woodland, somewhere near the middle of the isle of Terceira. An ancient potsherd — dated at two- or three-thousand years — found, by a local university professor, nestled within a cluster of stone monuments.

It’s a perfect Azorean summer’s day when Matilde and Lourenço, who love this place, who spend a summer showing us its bounty, take us there.

Terceira is the third-largest island and the third discovered, and is green of every hue. Emerald pasture blankets rolling hills above the old town of Angra; mellow tones of sage and olive dapple the laurel forests inland; and at its centre, the black-green of Santa Bárbara mountain rises above the undulating landscape below. All around is blue — ocean for thousands of miles; we are a distant speck in the mid-Atlantic.

As we drive up to the foothills of Santa Bárbara, this spectacle unfolds itself: the terracotta towers and steeples of the town; the little farming villages with their white-stuccoed churches and magenta bougainvillea; the hedgerows of hydrangea so blue it echoes the sky. The car turns a corner and, without realising, we have risen hundreds of feet above the shoreline — the sea a distant canopy, speckled by waves and dolphins, and refractions of the noon sun.

We alight in a non-descript place, unmarked, an off-road at a lane’s edge. We ascend through an avenue of trees touched by the sweet scent of ginger-lily and Japanese cedar. The woodland is hushed; there is only the melodic call of the bullfinch and wagtail. The hillside is burdened with basalt boulders the size of tombs — we have to clamber over them to make our way.

And as we climb, features start to manifest: bowl-shapes carved into rock; flattened stones atop one another; dolmens and shrines, drawing us inward.

Here is the village of megaliths, concealed by the woodland. We murmur to each other in excitement: maybe the hunter-gatherers used the bowls as grain-grinders; the cromlech as a temple. The atmosphere takes on a heaviness, like the air after the earth is turned; damp, the fragrance of ancient peoples over the course of time. I don’t know if it’s the megaliths or the freshness of the forest, but the oldness of the place overwhelms. What strength it must have taken to put these rocks atop each other; what import the people attached to it all.

II

It’s funny, though, that in the day-to-day, no-one seems to pay this place, or this discovery, the blindest bit of notice.

Yes, there’s some coverage in the daily news. “Piece of pottery on Terceira confirms human presence before the Portuguese,” one local daily says on page eight. To me, in the Portuguese Empire’s Atlantic hub, it feels revolutionary; it feels a sacrilege. I am gripped.

But, in the town, it’s not the hot gossip. Most people still prefer to talk about the McDonalds. If people engage at all, their tone is disinterested. “It’s probably not what the professor says, but why shouldn’t someone else have found the islands before the Portuguese?”

I mean, certainly I get it: there are bigger priorities. Even two-thousand kilometres out to sea, the spectre of the pandemic has touched the archipelago. The newspapers keep a morbid count of cases on nearby São Miguel, and the airport reports its testing stats. When I try to visit, the Convent of São Gonçalo is shuttered to protect its aged nuns. There is a rumour that on Pico island, a little girl tested positive despite having no contact with the outside world.

The town museum is empty on a Saturday. There are no tourists here anymore. Masked up, I wander the exhibits with a silent guide with golden sneakers who switches the lights on for me, and waits out of sight. I dare to ask her about the potsherd.

“It’s not the first of these claims,” she says. “Did you know that in the eighteenth century, someone found a Carthaginian coin on Corvo island?” There are many pre-Portuguese references to mid-Atlantic islands, from Plutarch to the Medici Atlas, she adds.

I remember two gangly eccentrics in the Uma Aventura series — the Famous Five of Portugal — who claim the archipelago as the True Atlantis.

Driven by some compulsion to bore every Azorean, I bring each conversation back to it — despite all indication that it excites only me.

As we return to town in a taxi one day, the driver points out an open-air exhibition of the native flora and fauna of the Azores, blown-up photos of butterflies and bats on road-side hoardings.

“We don’t have a long history,” he says, “but we have ancient and awesome nature — where else do you get sea and woodland and prairie all in the same vista?”

“But senhor, haven’t you heard about the rock constructions that were here before the Portuguese?” I get my boyfriend to ask in Portuguese, tapping his shoulder with an eager grin.

“I don’t know about that.” The driver pauses for a time. “But have you heard about the new McDonalds? It opens on 10 October.” We curse our luck — a week after we’re due to leave.

III

“If the situation worsens, I’ll stop the lessons — because you cannot do this with a face-mask,” my Portuguese teacher, Maria de Lurdes, says at our first lesson. She looks me in the eyes and laughs. She is a short-haired vegetarian who, like many Azoreans, spent decades toiling in America, and now goes for daily walks by the beach.

Her brother runs a snack-bar on Av. Infante Dom Henrique. I ask her if he’s worried about the new McDonalds. She grimaces at the mention of the thing, but shrugs. “Ah, they are apples and oranges — there’s room for both.”

Will she be visiting? “It’s not for me,” she laughs. She prefers the organic restaurant in the Duque da Terceira gardens where she can hound the island’s literati. She expresses disdain for her fellow islanders (they are close-minded, they are gossips) — but she is also keen for me to pick up the best habits of Terceirian Portuguese: here, she corrects me, we do not call them aldeias, but rather freguesias — parishes, not villages. I write the words down in my notepad.

Here is the thing. It takes me a while to cotton on, but I think I’ve found the magic sauce. The Azoreans don’t love the islands because of their place in the Portuguese psyche, or because Dom Infante Henrique, O Navegador, found them. They love the islands when they go kayaking in the open ocean, when they celebrate the Festival of the Holy Spirit every spring, and when they gorge on alcatra with massa sovada, batata doce and sweet Dona Amélia cakes.

And for the rest of us, the professor and me, perhaps the pottery is compelling not for its dismantling of the national story, but because of its human message — about capability, the interconnectedness of peoples in times long-gone. The mystery of it — an unknown people, a route we will never know, a disappearance that will remain lost to the dust of history.

It is me who longs for these islands to be the real Atlantis, the Fortunate Isles, the immrama.

IV

One Saturday in September, we go litter-picking on the beach to repay our debt to the place and afterwards wash off in the sea. While we’re drying under the sun, a young American man feels chatty. He’s from Appalachia; he’s pleased we know where that is — I daren’t tell him I know it from Deliverance. He tells us about the life that brought him here. He’s lived in Japan, Djibouti and Germany, he says (Okinawa, Lemonnier, Baumholder — a panoply of US military bases). “I’ve had the pick of where I can set down roots, but this is where I choose to call home.” He stretches out, self-satisfied, on the concrete. Lourenço and Matilde look down at the ground.

I heard he flew back home to storm the Capitol.

This is what I think I learned in the Azores: when you find paradise, you don’t want to share it. Every American, every Englishman, every mainlander who comes along picks away a little bit of its beauty. The islands are loveliest when the bathing zones are quiet, and no-one interrupts your long, meditative walk up to the volcano’s caldera. I suppose it’s good that we left, too.

We sail out to Graciosa, a sparse little island four hours away. There’s a crowd of people at the dock when the ferry lands: our arrival is Friday’s entertainment, the driver says as our taxi winds through wooded hills. The place has an edge-of-world feeling. The weather is grim — grey and close — and the hotel sits on craggy volcanic rock looking out to the granite ocean. It is unrelentingly windy; “We sow and the wind blows it away! It is the most powerful force in the world!” a villager told the writer Raúl Brandão in the 1920s. There’s a wide stone ramp nearby where whalers used to haul in their stinking catch. I walk along a scrubby wasteland between rock and sea, to find the remains of an old fort built by Jews escaping the Portuguese inquisition. There’s just a marker there now — “CEMITÉRIO JUDAICO” — cut into a basalt monolith. Like the people of the potsherd, they are enigma now, too.

Back in Angra, the night before our departure, the rain is pelting. We drive to Av. Infante Dom Henrique. McDonalds, it turns out, brought forward its launch-date. There’s a line of cars stretching around the block and into the town-centre. The building is gleaming up ahead: crisp green steel, fresh red roof, those bright golden arches shining above. We are hungry, but the traffic line is too long: we give up and go to Burger King on the opposite side of town.

I feel our departure like needles to the heart; it weighs on me. I take long walks to my favourite places. I love the islands too, now, I love the sea and the Dona Amélias and all the rest; I want to stay forever. We seem to have found family here. “The Azoreans have a thing about goodbyes,” a friend tells me. Maria de Lurdes tears up at my last lesson; Lourenço’s mother gives us maternal embraces and weeps.

News trickles out: As it happens, no-one in the universities believes the professor. The carbon-dating is spurious; there are massive holes in the claims — not least the lack of evidence, back in mainland Europe, for Neolithic sailing capacity of the kind needed to get across the Atlantic.

It doesn’t matter. I take one last dash to drink in as much of the place as I can. At the west, the sun sets pink over the island of São Jorge, and I spy the craggy, translucent cap of Pico — Portugal’s highest mountain — just beyond. At the east, north, south, there is nothing — only sea, the sea until Greenland and Antarctica. We are an aberration in the ocean, content in our perfect isolation.