The island city is, as most are, best viewed from over your shoulder, from the steepling hills, as you leave its annoyances and go into the country beyond. It is only a few miles before you are in a different land; an astounding country of green and mountainous silence.
Up there in the secret interior, men and women work in patches of terrace wearing, strangely, woollen hats which enclose their ears but with nothing on their feet. They grow everything from cabbages to yams (such is the climate and the topography), from chestnuts to custard apples, from potatoes to pawpaw. But they have to buy their meat from the town for there is scarcely room to graze sheep or a cow.
To travel through these placid upland places is to see glimpses of an untouched life: children in smocks dawdling from school; men carrying great loads on their bonneted heads; a journeying coffee seller with his pole and urns; a country funeral, the mourners in carts beneath a mass of umbrellas; women wearing away the stones of mountain streams with their eternal washing. Outside the door of an inn, overlooking one of the most superlative views I have seen, stood a blind man, never to know what he was missing.
Water runs and tumbles in the high places. On one road the traveller passes through eight waterfalls. The water is garnered in the mountains and fed down to the lowland settlements and fields by a spider’s web of ancient canals, called levadas, cut, like the roads, by the hands of the peasants through hard rock. The country seems to go forever upwards; up to the peaks, to the barren tops sometimes strewn with snow, to the clouds that Zarco saw.
The British, during the assembly of their Empire, proved to be more able and persuasive in colonies that belonged to somebody else. This was the case in Madeira where their military presence was perfunctory but where their influence was profound and long lasting. Today this influence remains more in evidence than in many former British territories.
Captain Cook was one of the first admirers of the island. ‘Madeira,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘is the recipient of Nature’s most liberal gifts.’ He did not stop for more than a few days. But others did. Two of the novelties enjoyed by today’s tourists – the bullock-sledge and the downhill running-sledge – were the respective brainchildren of a Captain Bulkeley of the Life Guards and a Mr R. M. Gordon. Both conveyances were born out of the ready and rough mountain roads. Captain Bulkeley designed a bullock-carro made for himself and had another made for his wife. Mr Gordon used his sledge to toboggan down the bumpy slope from his hillside villa into Funchal. Naturally he had a servant to pull it back up again. English exiles planted most of the early gardens in the island, recognizing that in this equable place almost anything would flourish. The plants, seeds and saplings, brought by calling sailors, thrived in the warm summers and easy winters – the coral tree from Brazil, the poinsettia from the South Seas, the rose of Sharon, the avocado; shrubs and small flowers of the Andes, Queensland silk oak, tree heather from Ethiopia; the strawberry from the English cottage garden. The delicate embroidery which is the art of Madeiran women and passed on only to selected girls was first demonstrated by Elizabeth Phelps, an English gentlewoman. A story that Thomas Chippendale visited the island and had a hand in the founding of the famous wickerwork furniture industry is unlikely to be proved.
The Madeira wine trade was established by a Scotsman. Shakespeare wrote of the Duke of Clarence drowning in a barrel of malmsey, which is normally better as a drink. The distinctive Madeira wines were discovered, literally, by accident. Sailors tossing on the Atlantic discovered that the contents of the casks in the hold were improved by the rough treatment and the hot conditions. They sang a song which went, ‘The moon dost shine, And our ballast is old wine.’
The Blandy family sailed from Britain many generations ago and is now the most powerful of the island’s business families. Reid’s Hotel, which among many other assets the family owns, is slightly more British than the London Ritz. There is a pre-war gentility that is all-pervasive. A band plays Palm Court favourites; tea, with Madeira cake, is served on the terrace; and there was a time when the hotel refused to serve Coca Cola. Sir Winston Churchill frequently stayed there and is still remembered by many Madeirans simply as the man in the big hat who spent days painting the beautiful bay at Câmara de Lobos and never quite got it right.
Zarco, who became governor of the island, chose Câmara de Lobos (the ‘cave of wolves’) as the subject for his coat-of-arms and it is to be seen today, topped by a hungry-looking wolf with two wolves rampant below. The wolves of Câmara de Lobos, however, were in reality sea-wolves or seals, who used to howl from their cavern on moony nights.
There is a legend that the English arrived in Madeira before Zarco did. For in the fourteenth century Robert Machin, a merchant adventurer, fled from Bristol with a lady, Anne d’Arset, whose outraged father was in close pursuit. They set course for Brittany but missed it by a thousand miles, a storm finally depositing them on the shore of Madeira at the place today called Machico. Here they fell ill and died and were buried by their sailor companions on the lonely shore.
Their graves have been lost but in the small boat-building village today is a chapel that contains two crosses. The first cross is the subject of considerable veneration since it was washed out to sea once when the village was engulfed during a storm. The 4 ½-foot crucifix was found by an American ship many days later, far out and floating placidly. The crucifix was thought to be miraculous and was taken to Funchal where it was displayed in the cathedral until the chapel at Machico was restored. The second cross, much smaller and fashioned from juniper, is said to be the one from the grave of the sorry lovers. It bears an inscription, ‘The remains of Machin’s cross collected and deposited here by Robert Page in 1825.’
From the business interests of the Blandy family to elderly ladies in print dresses taking tea on Reid’s terrace, signs of the British in Madeira are easy to find. There is an English library and an Anglican Church, a one-time chaplain of which, the Reverend Canon Arthur Walters, a poetic, rugby-playing Welshman, I met on a previous journey aboard the ship taking him to his new parish. His church sits among the Catholic churches of Funchal but, to set it apart, it is not permitted a spire but has instead a dome.
In the village of Camacha, the centre of the basket-weaving industry, there is a curious plaque noting that this was the place where football was first played on Portuguese soil. The British influence again.
Not far away, but higher into the pale eucalyptus trees, I discovered something strange and, for me, exciting. I had heard that in a place called Santo da Serra there had briefly been a British garrison, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Napoleon was threatening Madeira and the troops were sent to protect the possession of Britain’s Portuguese ally. (Napoleon, on his way to St Helena, called in at Funchal – or at least the ship transporting him did – and he was flattered at being called ‘Your Majesty’ by the British consul who went aboard to see he was comfortable.)
It was said that the British troops had left their marks in several ways, one being a number of fair-haired, blue-eyed children whose descendants can be quietly distinguished today, and the other by carving their names in the masonry of the village fountain.
But no one I asked, even those in the tourist business, could recall seeing the carvings; nor could Arlindo, my driver and guide, who thought he knew every stone on the island; nor indeed could the old men sitting in the threadbare square of Santo de Serra. They shook their heads and we departed.
After a mile down the mountain I decided to turn back. We immediately saw that the old men had been discussing the matter among themselves. Now one sage remembered; yes, there had been a fountain once, but it was outside the village now, down a rutted track, lost under the growth of the mountain. He had not seen it since he was a boy. We followed his directions. A woman in a field near the spot said she had never heard tell of a fountain but then, as we were going to look further, she came running after us to say that years before somebody else had come to lo
ok for the same thing. She pointed to a jungle, an overgrown conglomeration of vines, cider apples and cabbages.
There Arlindo and I discovered, all but hidden under the entwined growth, a flight of mossy, slippery steps. Carefully we descended. The air was fetid. At the bottom was a stagnant pond buzzing with dragonflies. And also there were the remains of a carved fountain, now almost mouldy . . . and there too, in the masonry, were the engraved names of those soldiers of long ago – Selby, Taylor, Smith, Tate, W. Swaynes, dated 1798, Anthony W. Seely, E. F. Goodall, Marshall and E. N. Taylor, 1810.
It was a wonderful, satisfying moment.
Away from Funchal, anchored to the sea, many of Madeira’s people live in places of mediaeval isolation. Despite the road system that has prised its way into the bouldered and desolate mountains, there are still villages which have no communication beyond a primitive track. The hamac, a hammock slung on the shoulders of two or four muscular and agile men, is still used to transport aged or sick people to the nearest road, sometimes miles over mountains, so they can be collected by an ambulance. On these cots the British once enjoyed being carried to the summit of Pico Ruivo, the highest peak at 6,106 feet, to observe the sunrise.
People to the north live in long thatched houses that, built among the opulent greenery, might easily be in Samoa. The people go about their difficult but placid lives, working their terraces, without the benefits of the twentieth century. Most places aspire to television (Madeira has its own station to supplement programmes from the Portuguese mainland) but some valleys are so deep that little but shadows are seen on the screen. An important football match sees the men of such places trekking to the neighbour with the highest house in the district. He is the one to keep as a friend.
I chose a Sunday to go to Curral des Freiras, the village in the volcano, and it was a good day to choose. The weather had been as moody as Atlantic weather can be, warm with gusty rain, but now the sky quietened and as Arlindo drove up once more into the eucalyptus belt and the chestnuts, the sun robed the flanks of the mountains and crags.
There are various stories of how the village got its name – the Refuge of the Sisters – the most acceptable being that the nuns of a convent at Santa Clara fled there to escape the attentions of rampaging French pirates.
The road, opened in 1959, curls like a spring around the peaks. It was built, inch by rocky inch, cobblestone by cobblestone, by the labour of the people. Arlindo remembers it. ‘When I left the school at thirteen,’ he said, ‘my first job was to carry rocks and earth on the road-making. Even now, when I drive over that part of road, I must smile because I think some of it is mine.’
We stopped on the rim of the crater. There are houses there remote as sentinels, where people look directly from their windows into a green chasm of 2,000 feet. They cultivate every inch they can flatten. Husbandry must be as risky a business as it is at Cabo Girao, in the south, where the second highest cliff in the world soars straight from the Atlantic. Nineteen hundred feet up, and a foot from goodbye, peasants tend their important lettuces with never a second glance down.
From the volcano ridge I could see the orange roofs and the cotton-thread streets of Curral das Freiras strewn in the base of the crater. The habitations spread far beyond the village – and the new road – tapering up into the remote ravines with only a goat-track to join them with the outside world. The people value their shoes and boots above almost anything for they have to walk for an hour and a half before they reach Curral.
They were walking today for it was Sunday. The precise tinkle of the church bell came up through the sunny air. I could hear it easily at that height. It is astonishing how sounds rise from the deepest valley – a river ran across the green floor and I could hear it clattering over its stones, and a dog barked concisely. There was a fire sending a curl of smoke from a terrace and I could even smell that.
As we descended into the crater we could see the mountain folk walking down towards the village and its summoning bell. It was like one of those Disney scenes where cartoon people converge from miles and you see them tramping and singing over the hills.
If there is any piece of earth in my travels that I am glad I have visited it was that little place of Curral das Freiras, and especially on that day for I soon realized that Sunday was the time when all the people met together in the square and in the streets. They went to mass and then talked and drank and paid their bills in the low-ceilinged shops, and went back to their solitary existence laden with supplies for the week ahead.
A barber had set up his stool in a stone courtyard. A small boy was sitting with the normal impatience of small boys in barbers’ chairs, while the man shaved off every morsel of hair from his pate. Old men stood around nodding approvingly. In the square was a cartload of puzzled pigs.
To look into the open doors of the church was to see a scene similar to a Brueghel painting. Every pew was occupied and in the aisle children sat on the floor in the company of a dog and a yellow goat. The dog curled up and went to sleep. The singing broke out into the sunlight, followed closely by the worshippers as the mass ended. They poured from two doors, the women from one, the men from the other. They milled about in the stone square, finding their friends, gossiping; small, deep-eyed people, dressed in garments of the most aching colours, showing off their new boots, pulling at the bobbles on their coal-scuttle hats, the children chasing each other, the young people eyeing and flirting. Then, by the wall outside the church, I saw a young woman in black. She stood looking over into the churchyard, weeping quietly for a husband dead too soon. It all went on around her; all this contained life, a pinch of the world.
It was Arlindo’s birthday and he had met a friend, Martin Figeras, born in the crater but now living in Funchal. Each Sunday Martin returns to eat with his parents and, as he explained, ‘to put right again their television set.’ We went to one of the several bars now doing brisk after-mass trade. Martin brought along his father, whose name is João, and his mother who wears a fur coat bought by her other children who have long emigrated to Venezuela.
Old João was a wonderful character; scarcely five feet in height, even in his hat, his eyes so far back they had all but gone. I asked him about his childhood when the crater village was cut off from the world. Arlindo translated. ‘He wants me to tell you that he did not go to school, that he used to carry charcoal across the mountains from the north coast to Funchal and it sometimes took two days – and he’ll have a scotch please.’
I was drinking agua ardente, literally fire-water, made from sugar-cane and the only drink in my life I have never been able to finish. The islanders say it is very good for starting a coal fire. The others, however, and the party had now grown to a jolly group, all said they would like whisky if it was all right with me. The barman took out the bottle.
The bar was an extraordinary place. Low-ceilinged, a bare electric bulb hanging (the village has electricity but no running water – it still comes from a well), a few tattered posters, a Coca Cola advertisement, and a jukebox. Then I saw something else: two old ladies, widows in spider-black shawls, intent on a game of Space Invaders.
Madeira is a mountain that descends into some of the world’s darkest and deepest seas. The fishermen of Câmara de Lobos go out with lines two miles long and barbed with a hundred or more hooks. They catch the espada, the scabbard fish, which dwells in such deep places no man has ever seen one alive. By the time they are brought to the surface they are always dead. They are all the same size, three feet long, with a sinister black coat, no small fish or large fish have ever been caught; no one knows why not.
Another curiosity. Right here, in the middle of the wide Atlantic, in a church that for centuries has been a sighting mark for inward-bound sailors, on a hilltop where the maritime breezes blow, is the final resting place of an Emperor of landlocked Austria.
The exiled Emperor, Charles IV, died in the village of Monte in 1922 and now lies in a huge and suitably lugubrious coffin in a side chapel of
the church which, appropriately, has the aspect of a municipal building in, say, Salzburg. A few years ago the children of the Emperor visited the church and the coffin was opened for them to view their dead father.
The chapel is decorated with Austrian flags and banners and – touchingly – on one wall postcards of Austria sent by royalists in the old country and addressed to the Emperor, care of Nossa Senhora do Monte.
The leaving of Madeira is as exciting, if not more so, than the arriving. For this time the plane takes a sharp run like a hurdler and lifts off with little enough to spare, banking sharply over steep cliffs, houses, terraces, before heading out to sea. Twenty-eight miles away the plane lands again on the island of Porto Santo in order to refuel. The runway at Madeira is too short to allow an aircraft with a full load of passengers – plus fuel – to take off. There are plans, however, to extend it.
It had all been worth it though. This rough and rocky place, full of fascination and stories. As we came to Porto Santo and circled I could look back and see Madeira just as Zarco had seen it centuries before. A cloud.
MADEIRA situated latitude 32°38’N and longitude 16°54’W; area 314 sq. m (813 sq. km); population approx. 273,000; Portugal
AUSTRALASIA
The Queensland Islands
Within the Reef
Run a boat on the sand at high water, and the first step is planted in primitive bush – fragrant, clean and undefiled.
E. J. BANFIELD, The Confessions of a Beachcomber
Some islands lie close inshore, in groups, like ships in outer searoads awaiting harbour berths. They become familiar figures to people living on the mainland; they see them as hills in the water or shadows against the sky; they know their names and at times they may even visit them.
Within the girdle of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef there are islands like that. We think of the reef, 1,200 miles of coral shoals embroidering the Queensland coast, as low-lying, with its contours, its coloured hills and valleys below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. And so it is. But within the coral, from Fraser Island, north of Brisbane, to Anchor Cay off Cape York, at the distant northeastern tip of the state, and of the nation, lie many true islands, lofty, clothed with trees and clouds, sometimes touched by rainbows.
My World of Islands Page 18