The Azores are a remote Atlantic archipelago where geological upheaval, whaling history, and encounters with living whales converge. Set far from the continental shore, the islands make the ocean more than a passage between places: they are a landscape formed by it, and a setting in which the book moves from the human history of whale hunting toward close observation of whales at sea.

Atlantic Setting and Volcanic Geology

The nine islands lie about fifteen hundred miles east of Cape Cod and a thousand miles from Lisbon, scattered across the central Atlantic. Their small appearance on a map belies their scale beneath the water: they are the exposed summits of immense sea mounts, part of a submarine ridge running through the ocean. The islands therefore register a geography that ordinary maps obscure, with the visible land only a fraction of a much larger undersea structure.

The archipelago is also a meeting place of tectonic plates. Three islands lie on the Eurasian plate, three on the African plate, and the remainder on the American plate. The account emphasizes this continuing division through the islands’ black volcanic shores and the gradual movement of the western islands toward America and away from Europe. Pico, the youngest island, emerged roughly a quarter of a million years ago; its volcano remains active, and earthquakes recur with fatal consequences. The islands’ remoteness thus does not mean stillness: their foundations are described as continually changing.

Whaling, Migration, and Memory

Whaling is a major part of the Azores’ place in the book’s historical map. Its index groups the islands’ history with whaling from them, while the acknowledgements identify local whale museums and researchers who helped document that subject. The islands also reach beyond their own shores through the presence of Azoreans in the American whale fishery. In New Bedford, a neighborhood was known as Little Faial after its Azorean residents; Azoreans were among the many immigrant and non-American-born workers who crewed American whaling ships. The archipelago’s connection to whaling is therefore both maritime and social, linking an Atlantic homeland with the labor and communities of a distant port.

That history sits beside the book’s account of the whale ship as a constrained, mobile community. Families could travel aboard, and the ship’s limited quarters shaped work and domestic life; at sea, crews also exchanged letters and news when vessels met. These wider details give the Azores’ whaling past a human context: the ocean carried not only ships and whale products, but workers, histories, and ties between communities.

Pico and the Living Sea

In the waters around Pico, the narrative turns from historical inquiry to direct encounters with marine life. Over several days, the book’s narrator spends nearly all his time at sea, swimming with whales rather than watching from land. The experience depends on the guidance of João Quadresma and Marco Avila: whales are sometimes out of sight when the swimmer enters the water, and their rapid movement can carry them away before he can reach them. At other moments, he draws close enough to see their heads rise with each breath and their flukes lift above the waves before they dive.

The same waters reveal a wider community of animals. A Sowerby’s beaked whale approaches the boat, a species the narrator had previously known chiefly from museum models and reference books, where its population and threats were listed as unknown. Striped and spotted dolphins pass, followed by short-finned pilot whales with calves close beside their mothers. A manta ray swims beneath the keel, while flying fish and Portuguese men o’ war animate the surface. The variety changes the apparent emptiness of the ocean into a habitat whose inhabitants emerge in succession, often only briefly and unpredictably.

Narrative Significance

The Azores bring the book’s central contrast into especially clear focus: whales are at once historical quarry and present, independent animals. The archipelago’s whaling record and its links to immigrant labor place it within the human history of extraction; the days spent swimming off Pico instead emphasize the limits of a view from shore or ship. Underwater, the narrator encounters whales at their level, while their movements and disappearances resist easy observation. The island setting thus joins geology, human history, and marine life without reducing the ocean to a backdrop: it is the force that shapes the land, carries the whaling past, and makes the living animals both near and difficult to know.