Brito Rebelo (General Jacinto Inácio de)

He is a native of São Miguel and wrote, among other works, the following: Casa dos Esmeraldos na ilha da Madeira (Ocidente, vol. II, no. 75); D. Ayres de Ornelas e Vasconcelos (ibid., vol. III, p. 3); and The Discovery of Madeira, which serves as the introduction to Dr Alberto Figueira Jardim’s work entitled Madeira (Lisbon, 1914).

This last work contains some curious information on certain points of our history. Speaking of the origin of the name Machico, given to a place on the east coast of Madeira, Mr Brito Rebêlo says: In 1894, on the occasion of the 5th centenary of the birth of Prince Henry the Navigator, I discovered the name of a sailor called Machico, captain of the ship of Infante Ferdinand, to whom this king gave some houses... The sailor Machico, or one of his descendants, happened to give his name to that part of Madeira (Machico), and this name gave rise to a thousand conjectures, all equally unfounded. With the disclosure of the fact I have just mentioned, it was established that Machico was the name of a sailor, and so all the disputes over the name ceased, after having given rise to numerous dissertations and lectures in foreign geographical societies and in the Lisbon Geographical Society (Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa).

We do not know whether Machico was the first to discover or to land at that landing place. . . but what we can establish is that Machico was the owner of a ship that lay at anchor in Lisbon and was moored to the city walls when King Henry II of Castile besieged that city. He must have made several voyages to various parts of the world, for ships are made to sail, and Machico, the owner of the ship, was a seaman of standing.

Mr Brito Rebelo supposes that Tristão Vaz Teixeira was a knight of foreign origin, perhaps of nobler birth than Zarco. When he turns to Christopher Columbus, he says that Columbus’s stay in Madeira is highly questionable, above all if we take it to have lasted a long time.

Mr Rebelo further declares that what Frutuoso relates on p. 166 of ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra) about the punishment inflicted on Tristão Barradas, a man held to be a fidalgo (nobleman of the lesser nobility), is false. He states that this man was called Diogo, not Tristão, and that he was not shackled with a fetter and set to grind in a flour mill, but seized by the hands and mutilated on the orders of Tristão Vaz, for having abused the hospitality Tristão Vaz had shown him. Tristão Vaz was not deported to the island of Príncipe, but was simply obliged to pay 40,000 réis, a very considerable sum for the period, for the barbarous punishment inflicted on Barradas.