After launches in Massachusetts and California, a new English-language study of Pico Island will be presented tonight at the Whalers Museum in Lajes do Pico

Some islands are hidden not by distance alone, but by the accumulated silence of history. They exist on maps, they are crossed by ships and airplanes, they live intensely in the memory of those who belong to them, and yet, beyond their shores, they remain strangely unknown. Pico has long inhabited that paradox: unmistakable to anyone who has stood beneath its mountain, yet still, for much of the outside world, an island half-covered by mist.

It is precisely that mist which Joel Silveira Ávila seeks to disperse in Shades of Black and Gray – An Inquiry into the Island of Pico and its History, an English-language volume devoted to the long historical journey of the island, from its discovery and settlement to the forces that shaped its society across the centuries.

The book will be presented tonight, August 22, at 9 p.m., in the auditorium of the Museu dos Baleeiros in Lajes do Pico. The event carries particular symbolic significance for the author, who is returning with the book to his native island after presenting it earlier this year in Massachusetts and California. Professors Susana Goulart Costa and Onésimo Teotónio de Almeida will participate in the session, which will also include a musical moment. Admission is free.

The title itself evokes the visual and historical language of Pico. Black is basalt, lava, stone walls, vineyards rooted in volcanic ground, the dark outlines of whaling boats cutting through Atlantic water. Gray is mist, ash, distance, memory, the uncertain territory between what has been remembered and what has been forgotten. Together, those two colors become more than a landscape. They become a metaphor for an island whose history has been written in struggle, endurance, departure and return.

The problem of Pico’s relative invisibility is hardly new.

In 1867, the American steamship Quaker City arrived in Horta at the beginning of a five-month voyage through Europe and the Holy Land. Among its passengers was Samuel Clemens—Mark Twain—who observed that the Azores were so little known that virtually no one aboard knew anything meaningful about them. Nearly six decades later, in 1926, Portuguese writer Raul Brandão traveled through the archipelago and gave his celebrated travel narrative a title that carried essentially the same judgment: As Ilhas Desconhecidas—The Unknown Islands.

The phrase continues to resonate because it describes more than geographical remoteness. Islands can be unknown even when they are visited. They can be seen without being understood.

Pico, perhaps more than most, invites that distinction. The mountain dominates nearly every image made of the island, yet the society that developed beneath it is the product of histories far more intricate than the iconic silhouette suggests. There are centuries of settlement, faith, labor, migration, agriculture, whaling, maritime movement and adaptation contained in that landscape.

Ávila’s book approaches those histories through a question-and-answer format, seeking to make the island intelligible to an English-speaking readership. Its subjects include the discovery and settlement of Pico and extend through several of the fundamental forces that shaped island life: religion, whaling, viticulture and emigration.

These are not isolated themes.

Religion in Pico, as elsewhere in the Azores, was never merely institutional. It became embedded in the architecture of villages, in feast days, processions, vows and the intimate language through which generations understood suffering and providence.

Whaling, meanwhile, belongs to another chapter of island endurance. For decades, the sea provided danger and livelihood in equal measure. Pico’s whaling history cannot be separated from courage, poverty, communal knowledge and the extraordinary ability of islanders to read an ocean on which their survival depended.

Viticulture tells a different story of human ingenuity. Few landscapes reveal more clearly the stubborn intelligence of island people than the vineyards of Pico, where volcanic stone was not accepted as an obstacle but transformed into protection. Walls were built, parcels divided, vines cultivated against wind and salt. What appeared inhospitable became productive through generations of labor.

And then there is emigration.

To tell Pico’s history without emigration would be almost impossible, because departure became one of the island’s most enduring social realities. Generations crossed the Atlantic toward North America and elsewhere, taking Pico with them in language, food, memory, religion and family narrative. The island therefore exists not only geographically in the Azores but emotionally across a much wider Atlantic world.

That makes the publication of an English-language history particularly significant. A book such as Shades of Black and Gray does more than explain Pico to strangers. It also creates a bridge toward descendants who may know the island through grandparents and family stories but cannot easily approach its history through Portuguese.

In this sense, translation into another linguistic world is not a dilution of identity. It can become a form of preservation.

For diaspora communities especially, history needs doors. Language is one of them.

The presentation at the Whalers Museum therefore seems especially appropriate. Few spaces in Pico carry so much historical density. The museum preserves the memory of a way of life in which men went to sea in small boats after enormous animals, and communities waited ashore with the knowledge that the Atlantic could provide livelihood while also demanding sacrifice.

To present a book about Pico there is to place historical inquiry inside one of the island’s great repositories of memory.

There is another irony in the journey of this particular book. It was first presented in Massachusetts and California—two places deeply marked by Azorean and specifically Picaroto migration—before returning to Pico itself. The itinerary almost reverses the great migratory movement of earlier generations. The people once left the island carrying memory outward; now a book about the island crosses the ocean and returns.

That circular movement is perhaps one of the most enduring structures of Azorean identity. Departure is rarely absolute. Neither is return. Even those who never come back geographically often return through family stories, pilgrimages, music, literature, food, genealogies, photographs and the inherited imagination of a place they may never have fully known. That is why books about islands matter. They resist disappearance. They insist that small places possess large histories.

Roger Lovegrove once included Pico among the world’s most remote and isolated places. Geographically, perhaps that characterization still contains some truth. Culturally and historically, however, remoteness is never the whole story. Pico has always been connected—to the Atlantic, to Europe, to the Americas, to whaling routes, migratory routes, religious traditions, commercial networks and generations of emigrants who carried the island across oceans.

What may have appeared isolated was, in reality, profoundly transatlantic.

Tonight, in Lajes do Pico, Shades of Black and Gray returns to the place whose history it seeks to illuminate. And perhaps that is the most fitting destination for a book that attempts to make an “unknown island” better known. Because the deepest purpose of history is not merely to explain what happened. It is to return a place to itself—with greater clarity, greater memory, and perhaps a little less mist.

Diniz Borges, Bruma Publications (adpated from a Museu do Pico Press Release)