funchal

Entries tagged with: funchal

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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