The Azores in the Travel Diary of William H. Prescott (September 1815-April 1816)

Abstract

From very early on, the islands of the Azores, or Western Islands, as these isles were known in the Anglophone world, have served as mid-Atlantic meeting point for Portuguese and American culture, a place for the exchange of ideas, images, and objects from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. I examine in this paper the travel diary of the young man William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859), who was to become one of the most important Romantic historians of antebellum America, in which he describes his approximately six-month stay on the island of St. Michael in the context of his European Grand Tour. In his depiction of the island, not entirely devoid of Anglo-Saxon cultural and civilizational biases, Prescott highlights the mildness of the climate, the exuberance of the vegetation, and the novelty of the landscape. Though filtered through the eyes of a young New Englander imbued with Protestant values, Prescott’s references to St. Michael’s, a Romantic and idyllic space privileged by nature, help us define the contours and/or boundaries of the cultural geography that separated the United States of America and the Azores in the earlier part of the nineteenth century.