The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The uninhabited Atlantic islands that fell under Portuguese rule have a special claim to attention. As with the Pacific islands, they were places where the human presence decisively transformed the environment, exploiting or in some cases destroying their fertility. They were places where settlers, living far from home in simple conditions, had to create a society that could function effectively despite the inability of the royal government back home to keep an eye on day-to-day affairs. They were also places where different social mixes came into being, whether through the arrival of Genoese in Madeira and Flemings in the Azores, or the presence of Jewish converts, black slaves and Portuguese convicts in the remotest island, São Tomé. They also offer insights into the very earliest phases of the European slave trade out of Africa, insights that can now be developed further following excavations in the Cape Verde Islands. For this was a clean New World, the first New World, newer than the New World that was soon to be discovered, because all the island groups in the eastern Atlantic apart from the Canaries were uninhabited. The rape of this virginal world by greedy Europeans is one of the themes of this chapter.

  Geographers have given these scattered islands the common name of ‘Macaronesia’, derived from the Greek term ‘Fortunate Isles’ (Mακάρων Nῆσοι, Makarōn Nēsoi), which was used in antiquity to describe the Canaries; this has too much of the flavour of macaroni and has often been shortened to ‘Macronesia’, by analogy with Micronesia in the Pacific. Some historians have preferred to use the term Méditerranée Atlantique, seeing the eastern Atlantic archipelagoes as an interconnected world that came into existence as merchants and migrants expanded beyond the familiar waters of the Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic shoreline into open seas that had rarely been navigated before the fourteenth century.1 The first of the Atlantic islands to be colonized were those in the Madeira archipelago. Although later legend told of a pair of storm-tossed and star-crossed English lovers who had been swept towards Madeira, the islands were uninhabited when the one-eyed João Gonçalves Zarco and his colleague Tristão Vaz, squires of Prince Henry, explored them in 1420. The low-lying island of Porto Santo close to Madeira was placed under the authority of another sea captain, named Perestrello, whose family had originated in Piacenza in northern Italy but settled in Portugal; later, Christopher Columbus would marry into this family and quite possibly gained knowledge of Atlantic waters by studying information the family had kept to itself.2

  The islands were already known to Italian and Catalan navigators of the fourteenth century: Madeira appears on the portolan charts as the ‘Isle of Wood’, Legname, which is exactly the meaning of the Portuguese word ‘Madeira’; and anyone sailing back from the Canaries after a slave-raid would have known how to catch the prevailing winds by swinging out north-westwards, which would have brought them in sight of Madeira, while an even greater swing might bring navigators to the Azores. It is an extraordinary fact that the colonization of the Pacific had already been completed with the settlement of New Zealand about a century earlier, while colonization of the Atlantic islands lagged far behind. In part this was because the Atlantic islands were fewer and more scattered; in part it was the result of relatively slow advances in shipbuilding. Eventually the Portuguese caravel became the trademark ship of the early Portuguese explorers. This versatile lateen-rigged ship, of around fifty tons, had a shallow keel that made it suitable for travelling upriver, an important advantage for those seeking the ‘River of Gold’ in west Africa. There were other advantages in its small size, compared to the great naus and cogs that visited Lisbon on their way to and from northern waters, or the ocean-going galleys of the Venetians and the Florentines that linked Flanders to Italy. For Portuguese timber resources were limited, and (as it turned out) the best timber was not to be found in Portugal itself, but out in the Atlantic.

  The colonization of Madeira really took off after 1433, when the old king, João I, died, and Henry found himself in full charge of the island; even then, he arrogated to himself greater powers than the Crown was willing to concede, and tussles between Henry and the kings of Portugal over jurisdiction in Madeira were still going on in 1451.3 Yet it was thanks to Henry, if his biographer is to be believed, that this small island became an economic powerhouse. According to Zurara, Henry supported the first settlers by sending them seeds and tools. His interest in the island grew as his attempts to gain a further foothold in Morocco met with complete failure; following defeat at Tangier in 1437, he turned his attention to the Atlantic islands. Although he saw these islands mainly as a source of revenue, he also boasted to the pope that he had freed the inhabitants of Madeira from Muslim rule and had brought them back to the Christian faith – a nonsensical statement that reveals more about his love for self-promotion than about the crusade against the Muslims.4

  Madeira lies 350 miles from Morocco and about the same distance from the Canaries. The island’s abundant hardwood became one of its best exports; it was said to be so strong that the inhabitants of Lisbon could use it to build new storeys on their houses.5 It was of great value to the growing Portuguese fleet; Madeira as well as Lisbon became a centre of shipbuilding. The discoverers divided up the territory, and one-eyed Zarco made his base at the ‘place of fennel’, O Funchal, now the island capital, where he and his followers flourished. The fertile, well-watered soil, left untended since the island rose out of the sea, yielded vast quantities of wheat; since the settler population was small (150 households in 1450, according to Zurara), Madeira offered a lifeline to Lisbon, which was suffering from lack of access to Moroccan grain now that the Portuguese were launching campaigns against the Marinid sultanate. Prince Henry’s Venetian captain, Alvise da Cà da Mosto (or Cadamosto), stated that around 1455 Madeira produced 68,000 bushels of wheat each year. All this meant that the ecology of Madeira underwent massive transformations following the arrival of the first human settlers, and the same applies to the other Atlantic islands that the Portuguese colonized.6

  Nonetheless, flat land suitable for wheat production was not easy to find on such a mountainous island, and Henry had grander plans. Da Mosto was travelling past Cape St Vincent on a Venetian galley bound for Flanders; the ship had to put in, and Prince Henry lured da Mosto into his service by showing him samples of sugar grown in Madeira, something that would tempt any Italian merchant.7 Demand for sugar was booming, just as supplies of sugar from the eastern Mediterranean were threatened by the Turkish advance to Constantinople; princely courts and prosperous merchants were enthusiastic consumers of luxury foodstuffs, including crystallized fruits and little caskets containing blocks of white sugar.8 Sicily, Valencia and Muslim Granada were among the great sugar centres of the Mediterranean, and Madeiran sugar was cultivated from either Sicilian sugar stocks or southern Portuguese ones recently set up by Genoese entrepreneurs in the Algarve. But to produce sugar in the subtropical climate of Madeira was an inspired idea; Madeira was superbly equipped for this, with its vast amounts of wood (needed for the boiling of the cane) and of water, running down the steep hills. Its sugar could then be supplied to Flanders via Lisbon, or, before long, directly – many of the splendid Flemish paintings in the Museum of Sacred Art in Funchal were acquired as payment for sugar by Madeiran merchants of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.

  Da Mosto thought that the island was already producing 1,600 arrobas, or about 24,000 kg, of sugar by 1456. But these were small beginnings: by 1498 something like 600,000 kg of sugar were being sent to Flanders alone, with 225,000 bound for Venice and only 105,000 for consumption in Portugal – the total for just these places approaches 1,000,000 kilograms, but that year a decision was made to limit the quantity exported to 1,800,000 kg (120,000 arrobas), which was just as well, as the sugar cane was beginning to exhaust the land.9 Europe had developed a sweet tooth. And the quantity being produced grew and grew. The Portuguese Cortes, or parliament, of 1481–2 noted that twenty large ships and forty to fifty smaller ones were loading sugar and some other goods, ‘f
or the nobility and richness of the merchandise of great value which they have and harvest in the said islands’. Pope Paul II praised Zarco and his colleagues for all they had done to supply the Iberian kingdoms with sugar, wheat and other ‘comforts’.10

  Administering places a long way from Lisbon was a challenge. The ‘sub-donatories’, Zarco and Vaz on Madeira and Perestrello on Porto Santo, who had discovered the islands and were Henry’s agents there, were authorized to operate local courts; they received one tenth of the revenues from their lands, passing the remaining nine tenths to Henry, or rather the Order of Christ. Their share might seem paltry, but it was not paltry so long as the Madeira archipelago continued to export its sugar and wheat on such an enormous scale. Madeirans at large benefited handsomely from exemption from trade taxes on goods sent to Portugal, which the Crown renounced in 1444 to encourage trade. It is no wonder, then, that, by the end of the fifteenth century, Madeira was attracting settlers from Portugal, Genoa and Tuscany; others arrived from Flanders and Germany, given the close links between Madeira and the sugar trade to Flanders. In 1457, some German settlers were allowed to plant vines and sugar and to build a chapel and houses. The Portuguese imposed few restrictions on settlers, though the Madeirans were keen to expel the enslaved Canary islanders who had been imported to work the sugar mills, and were proving extremely truculent.11 The Genoese brought capital and enterprise, and helped kick-start the sugar industry. Among them was Christopher Columbus, who visited the archipelago in 1478, aiming to buy sugar in exchange for cloth; and his business partner in Madeira was Jean de Esmerault, a Fleming. This mixed population had reached about 15,000 by 1500, which included the full panoply of priests, merchants and artisans as well as the descendants of the original cultivators of the soil. Of this total, some 2,000 were slaves, either from the Canaries or from west Africa. This is a surprisingly low figure, since the sugar industry demanded plenty of cheap labour for back-breaking work; the main labour force was Portuguese and Italian.

  Another source of stability was the simple fact that the first European proprietors lived a long time, Zarco remaining in charge of southern Madeira for about forty years. It is not hard to see why they lasted so long. They lived far from the centres of plague and other disease in western Europe; their diet was a plainer but healthier one than that of minor nobles in Iberia or Italy; the water was clean; they fought few or no wars. Nature could be remoulded: whether by the planting of sugar stocks or by the cattle and sheep that first populated the Azores. Sometimes, admittedly, this did not work well: when rabbits were introduced to Porto Santo they gobbled up the vegetation and turned the island into a semi-desert; it has never recovered. Madeira lost part of its tree cover as its timber was sent for export or burned in the furnaces of the sugar mills.12

  II

  The Azores too were evidently known to mapmakers before their colonization; they are recognizable in fourteenth-century Majorcan portolan charts.13 Lying between 800 and 1,000 miles due west of Lisbon, these nine volcanic peaks gradually became valued for themselves, rather than any notional value in the fight against Islam in north-west Africa. Although they lie much further out from Portugal than Madeira, ships returning from Madeira or the Canaries would have taken advantage of the prevailing winds to follow a great curve that took them towards the Azores before they turned eastwards in the direction of Lisbon; the story grew that the Portuguese had reached the legendary ‘Isle of Brazil’ that was said to lie out in the Atlantic, or possibly the ‘Isle of the Seven Cities’, inhabited by refugees from the Muslim conquest of Spain more than 700 years earlier.14 Impressed by the hawks that hovered over the islands, the Portuguese gave them the name ‘Hawk Islands’, Açores. These islands were completely uninhabited by humans, and attempts to argue that the Phoenicians knew the islands or that stone structures on the island date back to Neolithic times are based on very flimsy evidence. In 1439 Henry the Navigator received permission from the Crown to settle ‘the seven islands of the Azores’, so they already had their name and a number; and, though it was the wrong number, it was the number of units in the Isle of the Seven Cities.

  In the 1450s, Henry claimed, with typical bravado, that the Azores ‘had never known any lordship but his’. This was a blatant lie, as the king had earlier insisted he must share the lordship with his brother Dom Pedro, but by the time Henry made his claim Dom Pedro had rebelled against the Crown, had been defeated and had died, so his rights could be ignored. As at Ceuta, convicts were regularly dumped here, though in 1453 one convict was able to argue that he should not be transported to the Azores for the rest of his life, because conditions on the islands were still so primitive. No doubt he had friends in high places, for his argument, which succeeded, hardly stands up – solid buildings existed and dairy products and wheat abounded. The main concern back in Lisbon was not how to punish criminals but how to populate far-off islands and make sure the settlers stayed put.15

  Wetter and windier than Madeira, though still blessed with a benign climate, the Azores seemed ideal terrain for cattle rather than for people, and as the islands were opened up to settlement ships would arrive carrying cows, sheep and horses rather than human beings, leaving them awhile until they had bred, spread and cleared some of the meadows. The Azores are still a major source of dairy goods in Portugal, and are famous for their butter and cheese; there was some attempt to produce sugar, but the climate was not quite warm enough and manpower was in short supply – the inhabitants of one island, Santa Maria, had to send their canes to São Miguel across the water for processing, since they did not have the machinery themselves. In 1510 the Azores exported only about 6 per cent of the sugar exported by Madeira, and sometimes it was even less than that.16

  The Flemish connection was as important as the Portuguese one. Enterprising Flemings came and colonized, but not, as in Madeira, because of a sweet tooth. On the third island to be settled, appropriately known as Terceira, or ‘Third Island’, James of Bruges established a dominion around the little beach of Praia da Vitória in the north-east, building an elegant church with a Gothic gateway and stone-vaulted side chapels, out of materials that were brought all the way from Europe. Henry sent him a charter urging him to settle the island, ‘which had never before been settled by anyone in the world’, with good Catholics, and in the wake of this so many Flemings arrived that the whole group of islands was often called the ‘Flemish Isles’ rather than the Azores.17 The products they cultivated included the dark-blue substitute for indigo, woad, much in demand in the Flemish cloth workshops; by 1500, up to 60,000 bales of cured woad leaves were exported annually. Gradually, an intertwined network of islands emerged, as the Azores, Madeira and the Canaries exchanged goods and manpower: native Guanches from Tenerife were settled against their will in Madeira; Portuguese labourers emigrated to the Canaries; Genoese and Flemings arrived in all the islands. This network was itself tied to the emerging emporium of Lisbon, no longer a city of moderate size and importance, but the centre of a maritime trading world that stretched across great swathes of the eastern and northern Atlantic.18 By the late sixteenth century, the Azores became the strategic centre of a network of trade routes; ships arriving from South America and round the Cape from India gathered at Angra on Terceira, before proceeding in convoy to Portugal, in order to escape predators such as the English pirates who lurked in those waters. They were also important resupply centres for long-distance shipping.19

  III

  The exploration of the coast of Africa, the subject of the next chapter, resulted in the discovery of yet more uninhabited islands, west of Senegal. The debate about who first sighted the Cape Verde Islands, around the time of Henry the Navigator’s death in 1460, is not very instructive – maybe it was the Venetian captain of Prince Henry, Alvise da Mosto, maybe a Genoese named Antonio da Noli, maybe a Portuguese named Diogo Gomes, but the fact that two of the three were Italian says something about the reliance of the Portuguese on Italian navigational know-how. After their discov
ery, the islands were placed under the command of Antonio da Noli as captain-general. He proved to be yet another long-lived colonial master, and he held on to power even though for a brief period in 1486–7, when Castile and Portugal were at war, he was carried off to Spain, where he apparently abandoned his loyalty to the king of Portugal and recognized Ferdinand and Isabella as his overlords.20 He probably never returned to the islands; but neither Spain nor Portugal could really maintain control of such distant possessions, and once Castile and Portugal were at peace again, and once the pope had adjudicated these islands to Portugal, as he did in 1493/4, Portuguese claims to rule the islands could no longer be challenged from Spain.

  Like the Azores, these islands were stocked with animals, not so much to feed the exiguous population as the sailors who passed by, heading from Europe to the west. However, when livestock was introduced to the Cape Verde Islands goats and sheep uprooted the plants, the soil no longer retained such water as there was, for rainfall is low; and the landscape became even more parched and bare than it was already. The animals somehow survived; but hopes of making the islands into a second Madeira were foiled. The royal privilege establishing Portuguese settlement in the Cape Verde Islands, dated 1462, grandly talked of the rivers, woods, fisheries, coral, dyes and mines, but the reality was that these islands could offer very little apart from the ubiquitous lichen orchil, used to make purple dye, and salt from the island appropriately known as Sal, which could be used to salt the meat sold to passing ships. One island was being used as a leper colony by the time of Christopher Columbus, and others, including Sal, were left unoccupied.21