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 NEED OF EXPLORATION 173 There is no good reason for discrediting so many of the old maps. Their makers sometimes went wrong; but they tried to be accurate and would hardly, through a century or two, persist in making the northern island the greater one unless it was at first really so. Of course the most natural solution of the difficulty is that Corvo's border has sunk or the sea has risen over it, completely drowning the territory which made the lobes or curved outline of the island form in the medieval maps and leaving only above water its rocky backbone, with the crater for a nucleus. Apparently those lobes and their contents are just what might be most profitably dredged for and dived after. Perhaps the island has not greatly changed since Mr. Henriques wrote his little sketch of it in the sixth decade of the last cen- tury: The first part of the ride to it [the crater] is through steep and narrow lanes walled in with stones. Over those walls you can sometimes see the country right and left, which is divided into small and well-cultivated compartments by low stone walls. These small fields form narrow ter- races, one above another, looking from the sea like steps in the hills. An hour's ride brings you to an open mountain covered with heath where browse flocks of sheep and hogs, and about an hour and a half more to the crater on the summit, now a quiet green valley, with a dark, still pond in the center. . . . The Corvoites, particularly the women, are a happy and industrious people and have strong and healthy constitutions. The men in trade evince a remarkable shrewdness, proverbial among the other Azorians, but in private life their manners are simple and unassuming. . . . They are like a large family of little less than a thousand members, all living in the only village on the island. 22 25 Borges de F. Henriques, pp. 35-36.