To the Gold Coast for Gold | Page 9

were exceedingly civil and obliging, and food and wines were good and not costly.
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 sun glancing upon the thin greens of the northern flank; and, lastly, it broke into two masses--northern and southern--of peaks and precipices connected by a strip of lowland.
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 how history is written; and the discovery was, at best, a mere re-discovery, as we learn from Pliny (vi. 36), whose 'insulae purpurariae' cannot be confounded [Footnote: Mr. Major, however, would identify the Purple Islands with Oanarian Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, both possibly Continental.] with the Fortunate Islands, or Canaries. The 'Gaetulian dye' of King Juba in the Augustan age is not known. Its origin has been found in the orchilla still growing upon the Desertas; but this again appears unlikely enough. Ptolemy (iv. 1,16) also mentions 'Eryth��a,' the Red Isle--'red,' possibly, for the same reason; and Plutarch (in Suet.) may allude to the Madeiran group when he relates of the Fortunate Islands: 'They are two, separated only by a narrow channel, and at a distance of 400 leagues (read 320 miles) from the African coast.'
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 de Villa Mendo.] declares in 1590: 'The first discoverers of the Porto Santo Island, many say, were those Frenchmen and Castilians (Spaniards) who went forth from Castile to conquer the Canaries; these, when either outward or homeward bound, came upon the said island, and, for that they found it uninhabited and small, they abandoned it; but as they had weathered a storm and saved themselves there, they named it Port Holy.' Fructuoso (i. 5) expressly asserts that the Portuguese sailed from Lisbon in June 1419 for 'the Isle of Porto Sancto'(in 32�� N. lat.), which two years before had been discovered by some Castilian ships making the Canaries, the latter having been occupied a short time previously by the French; wherefore the pilot took that route.' The Jesuit chronicler continues to relate that after the formally proclaimed annexation of the Canaries by the Normans and Castilians (A.D. 1402-18), Prince Henry, the Navigator, despatched from Lagos, in 1417, an expedition to explore Cape Bojador, the 'gorbellied.' The three ships were worked by the Italian master-seaman Bertholomeu Palestrello or