chapter 2

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The Madeiran Archipelago

NOTE.–The Madeiran Archipelago consists of five islands disposed in a scalene triangle, whose points are Porto Santo (23 miles, north-east), Madeira (west), and the three Desertas (11 miles, south-east). The Great and Little Piton of the Selvagens, or Salvages (100 miles, south), though belonging to Portugal and to the district of Funchal, are geographically included in the Canarian group. Thus, probably, we may explain the ’Aprositos,’ or Inaccessible Island, which Ptolemy [Footnote: The great Alexandrian is here (iv. 6, §§ 33-4) sadly out of his reckoning. He places the group of six islands adjacent to Libya many degrees too far south (N. lat. 10°-16°), and assigns one meridian (0° 0’ 0”) to Aprositos, Pluitana (Pluvialia? Hierro?), Caspeiria (Capraria? Lanzarote?), and another and the same (1° 0’ 0”) to Pintouaria (Nivaria? Tenerife?), Hera (Junonia? Gomera?), and Canaria.] includes in his Six Fortunates; and the Isle of SS. Borondon and Maclovius the...

Posted on May 31, 2007 4:00 PM

Royal Edinburgh Hotel

We had not even the formality of a visit to the Custom-house: our unopened boxes were expected to pay only a small fee, besides the hire of boat, porters, and sledges. A cedula interina, costing 200 reis (11d.), was the sole expense for a permit to reside. What a contrast with London and Liverpool, where I have seen a uniform-case and a cocked hat-box subjected to the ’perfect politeness’ of certain unpleasant officials: where collections of natural history are plundered by paid thieves, [Footnote: When we last landed at Liverpool (May 22), the top tray of my wife’s trunk reached us empty, and some of the choicest birds shot by Cameron and myself were stolen. Since the days of Waterton the Liverpudlian custom-house has been a scandal and a national disgrace.] and where I have been obliged to drop my solitary bottle of Syrian raki! I was hotelled at the...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:59 PM

Funchal Cobble Pavement

We throw a few coppers to the diving-boys, who are expert as the Somali savages of Aden, and we quit our water prison in the three-keeled boats, Magno telluris amore Egressi ’Tellus,’ however, is represented at Funchal by chips and pebbles of black basalt like petrified kidneys, stuck on edge, often upon a base of bare rock. They are preferred to the slabs of Trieste and Northern Italy, which here, with the sole exception of the short Rua de Bettencourt, are confined to flights of steps. The surfaces are greased by rags and are polished by the passage of ’cars’ or coach-sleighs, which irreverents call ’cow-carts;’ these vehicles, evidently suggested by the corsa, or common sleigh, consist of a black-curtained carriage-body mounted on runners. The queer cobble-pavement, that resembles the mosaics of clams and palm-nuts further south, has sundry advantages. It is said to relieve the horses’ back sinews; it...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:58 PM

Dropping Anchor

As our anchor rattles downwards, two excise boats with the national flag take up their stations to starboard and port; and the boatmen are carefully watched with telescopes from the shore. The wiser Spaniards have made Santa Cruz, Tenerife, a free port. The health-officer presently gives us pratique, and we welcome the good ’monopolist,’ Mr. William Reid, and his son. The former, an Ayrshire man, has made himself proprietor of the four chief hostelries. Yates’s or Hollway’s in the Entrada da Cidade, or short avenue running north from the landing-place, has become a quasi-ruinous telegraph-station. Reid’s has blossomed into the ’Royal Edinburgh;’ it is rather a tavern than an hotel, admitting the ’casuals’ from passing steamers and men who are not welcome elsewhere. One of these, who called himself a writer for the press, and who waxed insultingly drunk, made our hours bitter; but the owner has a satisfactory and...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:56 PM

Funchal Bay

But the stump of caes, or jetty, which was dashed to pieces more than a score of years ago, remains as it was; The landing-place calls loudly for a T-headed pier of concrete blocks, or a gangway supported upon wooden piles and metal pilasters: one does not remark the want in fine weather; one does bitterly on bad days. There has been no attempt to make a port or even a débarcadère by connecting the basaltic lump Loo (Ilheu) Fort with the Pontinha, the curved scorpion’s tail of rock and masonry, Messieurs Blandy’s coal stores, to the west. Big ships must still roll at anchor in a dangerous open roadstead far off shore; and, during wet weather, ladies, well drenched by the surf, must be landed with the aid of a crane in what should be the inner harbour. The broken-down circus near Reid’s is to become a theatre, but...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:53 PM

Madeira City

And there, straight before us, lies the city, softly couched against the hill-side that faces the southern sea, and enjoying her ’kayf’ in the sinking sun. Her lower zone, though in the Temperates, is sub-tropical: Tuscany is found in the mid-heights, while it is Scotland in the bleak wolds about Pico Ruivo (6,100 feet) and the Paül (Moorland) da Serra. I now see some change since 1865. East of the yellow-washed, brown-bound fort of São Thiago Minor, the island patron, rises a huge white pile, or rather piles, the Lazaretto, with its three-arched bridge spanning the Wady Gonçalo Ayres. The fears of the people forbid its being used, although separated from them by a mile of open space. This over-caution at Madeira, as at Tenerife, often causes great inconvenience to foreign residents; moreover, it is directly opposed to treaty. There is a neat group, meat-market, abattoir, and fish-market–where there is...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:50 PM

Madeiran Flowers and Fennel

Though it be midwinter, the land is gorgeous with blossoms; with glowing rose, fuchsia, and geranium; with snowy datura, jasmine, belladonna, stephanotis, lily, and camelia; with golden bignonia and grevillea; with purple passion-creeper; with scarlet coral and poinciana; with blue jacaranda (rosewood), solanum and lavender; and with sight-dazzling bougainvillea of five varieties, in mauve, pink, and orange sheets. Nor have the upper heights been wholly bared. The mountain-flanks are still bushy and tufty with broom, gorse, and furze; with myrtle, bilberry and whortleberry; with laurels; with heaths 20 feet high, and with the imported pine. We spin round fantastic Garajáo, [Footnote: Not the meaningless Garajão, as travellers will write it.] the wart-nosed cliff of ’terns’ or ’sea-swallows’ (Sterna hirundo), by the northern barbarian termed, from its ruddy tints, Brazen Head. Here opens the well-known view perpetuated by every photographer–first the blue bay, then the sheet of white houses gradually rising...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:48 PM

Plants and Mountains of Eastern Madeira

The substantial works of the Gonçalo-Machico highway, the telegraph-posts, and the yellow-green lines of sugar-cane, were the only changes I could detect in Eastern Madeira. Nothing more charming than the variety and contrast of colours after the rusty-brown raiment which Southern Europe dons in mid-December. Even the barren, arid, and windswept eastern slopes glowed bright with the volcanic muds locally called laterites, and the foliated beds of saibros and maçapés, decomposed tufas oxidised red and yellow. As we drew nearer to Funchal, which looks like a giant plate-bande, tilted up at an angle of 40°, we were startled by the verdure of every shade and tint; the yellow-green of the sugar and common cane (Arundo sagittata), of the light-leaved aloe, banana, and hibiscus; the dark orange, myrtle, and holm-oak; the gloomy cypress, and the dull laurels and bay-trees, while waving palms, growing close to stiff pines and junipers (Oedro da...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:45 PM

Pedra do Furado

Under the lee of Porto Santo we enjoyed a dry deck and a foretaste of the soft and sensuous Madeiran ’Embate,’ the wester opposed to the Leste, Harmattan, Khammasin, or Scirocco, the dry wind which brings wet. [Footnote: The popular proverb is, ’A Leste never dies thirsty.’] Then we rolled over the twenty-five geographical miles separating us from our destination. Familiar sites greeted my eyes: here the ’Isle of Wood’ projects a dwarf tail composed of stony vertebræ: seen upon the map it looks like the thin handle of a broad chopper. The outermost or extreme east is the Ilha de Fora, where the A.S.S. Forerunner and the L. and H. Newton came to grief: a small light, one of the many on this shore, now warns the careless skipper; but apparently nothing is easier than to lose ships upon the safest coasts. Inside it is the Ponta de São...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:43 PM

Villa Baleira and Volcanos

I boated to the Holy Port in 1862, when Messieurs Blandy’s steamship Falcon was not in existence. And now as the Luso steamed along shore, no external change appeared. A bird’s-eye view of the islet suggests a podão or Madeiran billhook, about six miles by three. The tool’s broken point is the Ilha da Cima, facing to north-east, a contorted pile which resembles a magnified cinder. The handle is the Ilheu Baixo, to the south; and the blade is the tract of yellow sandy lowlands–the sole specimen of its sort in the Madeiras–connecting the extremities. Three tall cones at once disclose vulcanism; the Pico de Facho, or Beacon Peak (1,660 feet), the Pico de Anna Ferreira (910 feet), and the sugarloaf Pico de Castello (1,447 feet). The latter rises immediately north of the single town, and its head still shows in white points the ruins of the fort which more...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:40 PM

Origins of Porto Santo and Madeira

Both scraps of ground are of kindred although disputed origin. Classicists [Footnote: Plato, Timaeus, ii. 517. His ’fruit with a hard rind, affording meat, drink, and ointment,’ is evidently the cocoanut. The cause of the lost empire and the identity of its site with the Dolphin’s Ridge and the shallows noted by H.M.S. Challenger, have been ably pleaded in Atlantis, &c., by Ignatius Donnelly (London, Sampson Low, 1882).] find in these sons of Vulcan, the débris of Platonic Atlantis, a drowned continent, a ’Kingdom of Nowhere,’ which some cataclysm whelmed beneath the waters, leaving, for all evidence, three shattered groups of outcrops, like the Channel Islands, fragments of a lost empire, the ’bones of a wasted body.’ Geologists, noting that volcanoes almost always fringe mainlands, believe them destined, together with the Cape Verdes, to rampart in future ages the Dark Continent with a Ghaut-chain higher than the Andes. Other theorists...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:38 PM

Trees of Porto Santo and Madeira

The endogenous monster, indigenous to the Elysian Fields, is to the surrounding vegetation what the cockatrice is to the cock, the wyvern to the python. I should say ’was,’ for all the replants at Madeira and the Canaries are modern, and resemble only big toothsticks. But ’dragons’ proper have existed, and perhaps memories of these portents long lingered in the brain of protohistoric man. Even if they had been altogether fabulous, the fanciful Hellenic mind would easily have created them. The Dragoeiro with its boa-like bole, its silvery, light-glancing skin, and its scars stained with red blood, growing in a wild garden of glowing red-yellow oranges, would easily become the fiery saurian guarding the golden apples of the Hesperides. Porto Santo and Madeira, though near neighbours, are contrasts in most respects. The former has yellow sands and brackish water, full of magnesia and lime, which blacken the front teeth; the...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:36 PM

Dragoeiro Trees

Amongst the minor uses of this ’Dragon,’ the sweet yellowish berries called masainhas were famous for fattening pigs. The splinters made tooth-picks which, dipped in the juice, secured health for human gums. But the great virtue resided in the Sanguis Draconis, the ’Indian Cinnabaris’ of Pliny, [Footnote: N.H. xxxiii. 38.] who holds it to be the sanies of the dragon mixed with the blood of the dying elephant. The same semi-mystical name is given to the sap by the Arab pharmists: in the Middle Ages this strong astringent resin was a sovereign cure for all complaints; now it is used chiefly for varnishes. The gum forms great gouts like blood where the bark is wounded or fissured: at first it is soft as that of the cherry, but it hardens by exposure to a dry red lump somewhat like ’mummy.’ It has no special taste: when burnt the smell is...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:34 PM

Forest of Dragons

Long years rolled by before Porto Santo learnt to bear the vine, to breed large herds of small cattle, and to produce cereals whose yield is said to have been 60 to 1. Meanwhile it cut down for bowls, mortars, and canoes, as the Guanches did for shields, its thin forest of ’Dragons.’ The Dragoeiro (Dracaena Draco Linn., Palma canariensis Tourn.), which an Irish traveller called a ’dragon-palm,’ owed its vulgar name to the fancy that the fruit contained the perfect figure of a standing dragon with gaping mouth and long neck, spiny back and crocodile’s tail. It is a quaint tree of which any ingenious carpenter could make a model. The young trunk is somewhat like that of the Oreodoxa regia, or an asparagus immensely magnified; but it frequently grows larger above than below. At first it bears only bristly, ensiform leaves, four feet long by one to three...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:31 PM

History of Porto Santo

M. d’Avezac (loc. cit. p. 116) supports the claims of the Genoese, quoting the charts and portulans of the fourteenth century in which appear Italian names, as Insule dello Legname (of wood, materia, Madeira), Porto Sancto, Insule Deserte, and Insule Selvaggie. Mr. R. H. Major replies that these Italian navigators were commandants of expeditions fitted out by the Portuguese; and that this practice dated from 1341, when two ships officered by Genoese, with crews of [footnote: Amongst the ’ridiculous little blots, which are "nuts” to the old resident,’ I must confess to killing Robert Machim in 1334 instead of 1344; ’Collegio’ was also translated ’College’ instead of ’Jesuit Church.’] Italians, Castilians, and Hispani (Spanish and Portuguese), were seat to explore the Canaries. ’Holy Port’ began badly. The first governor, Perestrello, fled from the progeny of his own she-rabbit. This imprudence was also committed at Deserta Grande; and, presently, the cats...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:29 PM

Circumnavigation of Africa

The truth is that it would be as easy to name the discoverer of gunpowder or steam-power as to find the first circumnavigator of the African continent. I have no difficulty in believing that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians were capable of making the voyage. They were followed to West Africa in early days, according to El-Idrisi and Ibn. el-Wardi, by the Arabs. The former (late eleventh century) relates that an Arab expedition sailed from Lisbon, shortly after the eighth century, and named Madeira and Porto Santo the ’Islands El-Ghanam and Rákah.’ However that may be, the first Portuguese occupants found neither men nor ruins nor large quadrupeds upon any of the group. The English accident of hitting upon Madeira, and the romantic tale of Master Robert à Machim, or Machin, or Macham, and Mistress Anne d’Arfet, or Darby, or Dorset, which would have suited Camoens, and which I have told...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:27 PM

Porto Santo

The adventurers, it is said, carried on a good trade till 1430-90, when the civil wars distracting France left her without stomach for distant adventure; and in 1452 Portugal walked over the course. M. d’Avezac, who found Porto Santo in a French map of the fourteenth century, [Footnote: Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, cinquième série, tome v. p. 260. Also ’Iles de l’Afrique,’ in the Univers. Paris, 1868.] seems inclined to take the part of ’quelques précurseurs méconnus contre les prétentions trop exclusives des découvreurs officiels.’ Barbot’s details are circumstantial, but they have not been confirmed by contemporary evidence or by local tradition. The Portuguese indignantly deny the whole, and M. Valdez in his ’Complete Maritime Handbook’ [Footnote: Six Years of a Traveller’s Life in Western Africa. London, Hurst & Blackett, 1861.] alludes contemptuously to ’Norman pirates.’ They point out that Diego d’Azembuja, the chief captain, sent in 1481...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:25 PM

Elmina Castle

Barbot resumes that in 1383 the Rouen traders, combining with the Dieppe men, sent upon an exploring voyage three ships, one of which, La Vierge, ran down coast as far as where Commenda (Komenda or Komání) and Elmina now stand. At the latter place they built a fort and factory just one century before it was occupied by the Portuguese. The Frenchman declares that one of the Elmina castles was called Bastion de France, and ’on it are still to be seen some old arithmetical numbers, which are anno 13’ (i.e. 1383); ’the rest being defaced by weather.’ This first factory was afterwards incorporated with the modern building; and in 1387 it was enlarged with the addition of a chapel to lodge more than ten or twelve men, the original garrison. In 1670 Ogilvy [Footnote: London: Printed by Tho. Johnson for the author, and to be had at his house...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:23 PM

Attack upon the Canary Islands

The Spaniards prefer to believe that after Jehan de Béthencourt’s attack upon the Canaries (A.D. 1403), his soldier Lancelot, who named Lanzarote Island, touched at Porto Santo in 1417; and presently, sailing to the south-west, discovered Madeira. This appears reasonable enough. Patriotic Barbot (1700), in company with the mariner Villault de Belfons, Père Labat, and Ernest de Fréville, [Footnote: Mémoire sur le Commerce Maritime de Rouen.] claims the honour for France. According to that ’chief factor for the African Company,’ the merchants of Dieppe first traded to West Africa for cardamoms and ivory. This was during the reign of Charles V., and between 1364 and 1430, or half a century before the Portuguese. Their chief stations were Goree of Cape Verde, Sierra Leone, Cape Mount, the Kru or Liberian coast, then called ’of Grain,’ from the ’Guinea grains’ or Malaguetta pepper (Amomum granum Paradisi), and, lastly, the Gold Coast. Here...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:20 PM

Portuguese Islands

The Jesuit, Antonio Cordeyro, [Footnote: Historia insulana das Ilhas a Portugal sugoytas, pp. 61-96. Lisbon, 1717.] who borrows from the learned and trustworthy Dr. Gaspar Fructuoso, [Footnote: As Saudades da Terra, lib. i. ch. iii, Historia das Ilhas, &c. This lettered and conscientious chronicler, the first who wrote upon the Portuguese islands, was born (A.D. 1522) at Ponta Delgada (Thin Point) of St. Michael, Azores. He led a life of holiness and good works, composed his history in 1590, left many ’sons of his soul,’ as he called his books, and died in his natal place, A.D. 1591. The Madeiran portion of the two huge folios (some 4,000 pages of MS.) has been printed at Funchal, with copious notes by Dr. A. Rodrigues de Azevedo, Professor of Literature, &c., at the National Lyceum; and a copy was kindly lent to me, during the author’s absence in Lisbon, by Governor Viscount...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:18 PM

The Madeiran Group of Islands

It is generally held that the discovery of the Madeiran group (1418-19) was the first marking feature of the century which circumnavigated Africa, and that Porto Santo was ’invented ’by the Portuguese before Madeira. The popular account, however, goes lame. For instance, the story that tried and sturdy soldiers and seamen were deterred from advancing a few miles, and were driven back to Portugal by the ’thick impenetrable darkness which was guarded by a strange noise,’ and by anile fancies about the ’Mouth of Hell’ and ’Cipango,’ reads like mere stuff and nonsense. Again, great are the difficulties in determining the nationality of the explorers, and settling the conflicting claims of the French, Genoese, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and Arabs. History, and perhaps an aptitude for claiming, have assigned the honour exclusively to Lusitania: and every guide-book tells the same old tale. But I have lived long enough to have seen...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:16 PM

Tour of the Azores

From Madeira the Luso makes, once a month, the tour of the Azores, touching at each island–a great convenience–and returning in ten days. Early on Thursday, the 22nd, the lumpy, churning sea began to subside, and the invisible balm seduced all the sufferers to the quarter-deck. They were wild to sight Madeira as children to see the rising of the pantomime-curtain. There was not much to gaze at; but what will not attract man’s stare at sea?–a gull, a turtle, a flying fish! By the by, Captain Tuckey, of the Congo Expedition, remarked the ’extraordinary absence of sea-birds in the vicinity of Madeira and the Canaries:’ they have since learned the way thither. Porto Santo appeared as a purple lump of three knobs, a manner of ’gizzard island,’ backed by a deeper gloom of clouds–Madeira. Then it lit up with a pale glimmer as of snow, the effect of the...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:14 PM

Traveling from Lisbon to Madeira

FROM LISBON TO MADEIRA. My allotted week in Lisbon came to an end only too soon: in the society of friends, and in the Camonian room (Bibliotheca Nacional), which contains nearly 300 volumes, I should greatly have enjoyed a month. The s.s. Luso (Captain Silva), of the ’Empresa Insulana,’ one of the very few Portuguese steamers, announced her departure for December 20; and I found myself on board early in the morning, with a small but highly select escort to give me God-speed. Unfortunately the ’May weather’ had made way for the cacimbas (mists) of a rainy sou’-wester. The bar broke and roared at us; Cintra, the apex of Lisbon’s extinct volcano and the Mountain of the (Sun and) Moon, hid her beautiful head, and even the Rock of Lisbon disdained the normal display of sturdy flank. Then set in a brise carabinée, which lasted during our voyage of 525...

Posted on May 31, 2007 3:12 PM