The Life and Death of George Hayes

Afbeelding kaart

And suddenly there were the first 1,000 words of a new story, inspired by the mysteries surrounding one George Hayes.

His name first turned up last year, on our map of the Azores Islands, marking a spot on the shore of a crater lake on the island of Sao Miguel. Oddly enough, no one on the island was able to explain why this spot, which contained nothing but smelly and bubbling volcanic hot springs, would be marked with that particular name. The Tourist Office could not shed any light, nor could the map maker, oddly enough. And Google found the name—combined with the name of the island—in three locations only: the genealogy page of an Ivens family, the online obituary pages of the Massachusets SouthCoastToday.com online newspaper, and a PDF treatise on the correspondence between a Portugese naturalist working on Sao Miguel and none other than Sir Charles Darwin himself.*

I would be a lousy specfic writer if this odd combination of facts could not inspire me…**


* With both Google and the Web in constant flux, the combination of search terms now yields dozens of pages of hits. But I’m sticking with my original half-page result set!

** All cats are mammals, but not all mammals are cats. Which is to say I might still be a lousy specfic writer… 😀

2 thoughts on “The Life and Death of George Hayes

  1. George William Hayes – big cheese in Azores – British Consul, gentleman farmer, investor etc. Born and died in Azores. Ponta Delgada. Father was George Hayes. So place could be named after either.

    1. Thanks, S Kay, that’s awesome! I’m going to follow that lead. Do you happen to have an (online) source about George Sr/Jr? (The story’s been published with whatever information I had–or invented–but I’m still intrigued.)

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