Thursday, December 2
   Cheers to all you landlubbers shopping for Christmas presents.  WE CROSS THE EQUATOR ON DECEMBER 5 AT 11 P.M. The sky is blue and the tropical breezes lovely; drinks on the pool deck for the midnight buffet.

 Exploring the Cape Verde Islands
 Praia, Sao Tiago Island
 Incredible Proverty

It's the thirteenth day of our  voyage. We have now traveled a distance of 3,192 nautical miles from Piraeus, Greece to reach Cape Verde. When we leave Cape Verde at 11 o'clock tonight, we will set off on the long Atlantic crossing to Brazil, sailing 1,995 nautical miles and experiencing several days at sea.

We seemed to be traveling back five hundred years in history as we sailed westward from Africa.  We were headed toward Praia, the capitol on Sao Tiago in the Cape Verde Islands.  Our route was across the same waters as the earliest settlers of the islands-- Portuguese exiles and reprieved
convicts, Genovese and Flemish adventurers and Sephardic Jews-people who were among the first European settlers of Sao Tiago,  the first of  the Cape Verde islands to be settled by the Portuguese after they discovered the islands in the 16th century.

 Most people have never heard of the Cape Verde Islands, and they are rarely visited by Americans.  There were claimed by the Portuguese in 1460 and were considered uninhabited.  But given the prevailing winds and ocean
currents  people say that Moors or fishermen from the Guinea Coast, and Arabs or Phoenicians may well have visited the islands centuries before the Europeans.  But it was the Portuguese, under King Afonso V, who realized
the worth of this stopping point island to the European explorers, and he granted this archipelago to his brother, who used his imperial powers to divide the island of Sao Tiago up to two land grantees.  Settlement began as Portuguese seafarers stopped for a fresh water supply and a protected
harbor as well as to take advantage of the island's natural source of salt.  (It is astonishing to me how important the Portuguese and Spaniards were to the settlement of the New World and to Africa and how time and history reduce the importance of such once very powerful nations--and how  little we know of this fascinating world history of New World exploration.
To prepare us to understand what we'll be seeing on  Sao Tiago,  we spent an afternoon at sea learning about "drum circles."-common to many of the cultures we will experience. What a blast!    The ship's musicians brought
 out an amazing variety  of  unusual percussion instruments, wood, skin, and metal, ranging from tiny hand held bells, rattles or gongs that you beat, shake or blow, or twist.  Some were as large as a tuba, others tiny and hand-held  but almost all were uncommon, from cultures of Africa, the Caribbean, South America and the South Pacific Islands. We have an uninhibited group aboard this vessel!  You should have seen them jump up, join the circle and bang  away.. Hey! You wouldn't believe the music we produced,  just with clicks and clacks, hands tapping, rubbing, beating,
and drumming skins, metal and wood.  It actually sounded like a percussion orchestra on tour!
But nothing prepared me fully for the experiences we had as we traveled to Sao Domingo, an isolated resort located over the mountains on the other side of the island. The eleven hour round trip of 100 or so miles took us entirely over narrow cobblestone roads-and every stone on every two-lane
 road was pounded out entirely by hand, with people-many women and children stooped in the dust working along the road--  using primitive hand tools to fit together stones into an amazingly flat bedded road.  The roads over mountains, along rocky cliffs, and through tiny villages were very solid
and smooth-with curious what we called "speed bumps" where one road joined another every so often.  I can't describe how poor we found this island island to be-while also finding the people terribly friendly, waving and
 smiling at us.  It almost breaks your heart to see the poverty in which they live.  The island was populated mainly by African slaves, the port at Praia was used primarily by slave traders, and Charles Darwin stopped here and recorded this in his diary.

 It was also a major stop for whaling boats, and the collapse of the whaling industry at the end of the 19th century, and repeated droughts here, have created economic hardship here that's hard to imagine.  But an interesting fact is that the whaling boats voyaged from here to New England, and many Cape Verdeans sailed from the islands and on to New England.  It was common for Yankee whaling ship owners to hire harpooners  and steersmen for their whaling ships because they worked so hard (and were cheap labor), and about three-eighths of the crews of  Nantucket whaling ships were "colored."
They tell us that from 1825 to 1875 an average of 100 whaling ships a year called at Cape Verde Islands.  Some of these sailors stayed in Nantucket and Rhode Island, and there are settlements, churches, and societies  to this day of Cape Verdeans there. As usual, I digress.  This was one of the drought stricken places I've ever seen.  If only they had water here or could invent an efficient way to
 produce fresh water from salt water! There have been droughts on the islands since the 17th century, and the collapse of the whaling industry and drought have caused terrible famines-more than a few times 25, 30, or 40  percent of the population has  died of famine.  (In 1946 alone, 30,000 people, or 15 percent of the total population starved to death-and today, the gross domestic product is $1,000.)  Everywhere, you see children and women balancing enormous pails and  huge plastic pots and jugs on  their heads,  carrying precious  water from somewhere---But we didn't see ANY evidence of water, not a stream or pool,  except the salt water of the ocean --but on our "panoramic ride" in many places we viewed  dry, red dust, barren, dirt  hillsides and fields, interspersed with small banana plantations and dried brown fields of corn they harvest and grind to feed the cows and pigs .  However, don't get me wrong-- especially up in the mountains, the views were beautiful-- we came across beautiful poinsettias, bougainvillia,  castor beans and acacia trees growing despite lack of rain, and the fog shrouded mountains rose from rocky, wave battered cliffs.    It rained recently, we were told, for the first time in ten years, and that left some fertile green hillsides and vegetation.
 We rode in 12- passenger vans because of poor road conditions.  I sat behind the "guide," who didn't speak a word of English but spoke only French and Crioulo (the local blend of languages including Portuguese and West African words) and eventually struck up quite a conversation---in French, (Emily, you would be amazed at how quickly you pick up broken French again when you want to know when we will have dejeuner, when we will arrive at the sea, and where the bathroom is!)  He and I became fast friends because I was the only one who spoke any French.  At the end of the day, I said farewell and wished him "bon chance."  Then he totally surprised me; he said, "UMASS.  I go to UMASS en Janvier!  And the other driver said, "Boston, mon famille, Boston."