Columbus (Christopher)

A long-standing tradition holds that the illustrious navigator lived for some time in this archipelago and that it was here that he conceived his grand plan for the discovery of the New World. His stay in Madeira is positively affirmed by Las Casas in the Historia de las Indias, who says that he obtained this information from the very lips of Diogo Colombo, son of the great navigator and his father’s successor in the office of admiral of the Sea of the Indies. News of fresh discoveries was then constantly reaching this island, and ‘this was the beginning of the discovery of the new world’. Agostinho de Ornelas, in his Memoria sobre a residencia de Christovão Colombo na Ilha da Madeira, published in 1892, puts forward valuable arguments in support of that assertion, which is in any case followed by various historians and many biographers of Columbus. The discoverer of America married Dona Filipa Moniz, daughter of Bartolomeu Perestrelo, first donatary of the island of Porto Santo, but authors disagree about the lugar (settlement ranking between a town and a parish) where the marriage took place. The author of the interesting booklet A Mulher de Colombo states that the wedding was celebrated in the town (vila) of Machico. Serious presumptions and probabilities of some weight support this opinion, although one may dispute the truth of the claim. The Las Casas already cited, and others too, give Diogo Colombo as born on Porto Santo. There is also a constant tradition on this small island that the great navigator lived there, and the site of the house he occupied is even pointed out: it is that of the parish priest’s residence, near the mother church (igreja matriz).

A good deal has already been written about the building that tradition has always identified as the residence of Christopher Columbus in Funchal. It stood on the spot now occupied by the lane that bears the navigator’s name and links Rua do Sabão and Rua do Esmeraldo. The memoir by Agostinho de Ornelas already cited, a valuable study by Dr Álvaro de Azevedo, a detailed account published in 1878 in the Illustracion Espanola y Americana and still other writings have dealt with the subject at some length. The Madeiran writer J. Reis Gomes also treated it with great expertise in the notes to his book A Filha de Tristão das Damas, and we shall transcribe some passages from it that bear very closely on the subject of this article:

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The building that tradition has always pointed to as Columbus’s dwelling in Madeira, and which had belonged to the Fleming João Esmeraldo, was a large two-storey building with a broad roof terrace on top. It was later reduced to a granary and was therefore known as the granel do Poço, in this quarter set aside almost exclusively for merchants.

We would lengthen this note too much if we tried to relate here how this aristocratic residence passed from the heirs of its owner into the possession of the Council, which razed it. Issue no. 55 of the Revista Illustrada (1892) carries an article by Dr Álvaro Rodrigues de Azevedo entitled ‘Era inscripcional da casa memorada como da habitação de Colombo na Ilha da Madeira’, whose first part gives us reliable and precise information on this point.

The architecture of the building was originally Gothic, as shown by the pointed-arched section facing Rua do Sabão, which O Ocidente reproduced as an engraving in its no. 34 of May 1879, traced from one of the various photographs of the house taken by the distinguished Madeiran photographer João Camacho. It later underwent a restoration in which the forms of Renaissance architecture appear, more or less characteristically.

The date inscribed on the capital of the small column of the lovely two-light window shown in the accompanying plate has been read in three different ways. These varying readings led to diverse hypotheses about who built the house, about the likelihood that Columbus lived in it, and even to some digressions on the architectural style displayed on the façade facing Rua do Esmeraldo! It was first read – we have never quite understood how – as 1457, while the house was still standing. This date, strikingly at odds with the style, went round the world, and Henry Harrisse himself accepted it, referring to it in a note in his book Christophe Colomb.

That reading was plainly mistaken. Once the window had been taken down, it was seen that the last digit was a 4, clear and perfect, and doubt remained only over the third, which some read as a 7 and others as a 9. Was the inscribed date 1474 or 1494? For Agostinho de Ornelas, owner of the stones that made up the precious window, the third digit was a 7, since ‘the crossbar, though slightly curved, does not close with the upright’, as he states in his Memoria, which we have already cited in another note. For Dr Álvaro de Azevedo, who saw the date with his own eyes, took a tracing of it and made enquiries among scholars, the disputed digit was a 9, exactly as it was written and engraved at the end of the 15th century.

We too went recently to see these stones, which remain the property of the Ornelas family. All the digits were clear, and the only one that left us in doubt was that third one, with its unclosed head, which suggests a seven but, by its rounded shape and curved stem, points to a 9. We traced it and made the necessary enquiries on our own account. Through a friend, himself competent in the matter, we consulted those in the capital best able to enlighten us on the subject. We were satisfied that the doubtful digit was a 9 and the date of the inscription 1494. Among various supporting documents, absolute certainty came from a date printed in the Ephemerides of Regiomontanus, Venice edition of 1492. There, plain to see, was a nine of the same design: the head unclosed and the stem curved back.

The date 1494, on a window that in all probability had been pointed-arched but in fact displayed the characteristic form of our Renaissance architecture, which appeared in Portugal only in the 16th century, was truly puzzling to anyone who paid attention to this strange case.

The restoration belonged squarely to the reign of John II, a year before his death, yet it had the architectural character that appeared here only much later – albeit marked more specifically by maritime attributes drawn from the discoveries and conquests – and that came to be called the Manueline style!...

The fact, however, will not seem so remarkable once one considers that the building belonged to a foreigner, noble and rich, living in a land, Madeira, which through the currents of immigration had far closer ties with the rest of Europe, where Renaissance architecture was already flourishing, especially in Italy and France, than with the mainland of the Kingdom (reino, i.e. mainland Portugal), which that style had not yet reached at that date.

The building belonged to a private individual who, by his origins and his circle, was well placed to be seduced by the art form then triumphantly establishing itself in almost all of Europe. It is no wonder, then, that João Esmeraldo’s house long preceded, in this Portuguese land, the first Manueline forms of the buildings of the mainland.

Given the scarcity of good native artists and craftsmen at this period of island life, it is natural to suppose that the restoration of the house was necessarily entrusted to Italian or Flemish workmen, from the foreign colonies then most numerous in Madeira. This may well have led to the very suggestion of the architectural style that these workmen brought with them, as the most beautiful and most modern, from their countries of origin.

The fact that 1494 is the number carved at the top of the handsome two-light window does not contradict the long-standing and well-founded assertion that Columbus lived in Esmeraldo’s house as his guest, for the discoverer of America left Funchal years before that date. It simply means that he knew the building only in its original Gothic style, and that he certainly did not lean, in his meditations, on those basalt stones later worked by the Renaissance chisel. João Esmeraldo’s near-fanatical devotion to the great Italian, his guest – if one accepts the tradition, fully justified in our view by the author of the ‘Memoria sobre a residencia de Colombo na ilha da Madeira’ – explains even better the rich Flemish fidalgo (nobleman of the lesser nobility)’s predilection for the elegant artistic form whose true cradle was Columbus’s homeland.

Did João Esmeraldo himself have the building constructed from the start, or did he buy it from its original owner? This point, of minor importance to us, does not seem to have been fully cleared up, despite what Agostinho de Ornelas and Dr Álvaro Rodrigues de Azevedo wrote about it. We are inclined, however, in view of the text of the Madeiran genealogies and the words of Frutuoso, to believe that it was the Fleming who had the house built, and that it passed to his descendants as their manor house. The genealogies, without referring specifically to this dwelling, state that Esmeraldo built large houses in the street that took its name from him, and the author of ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra) says that Rua do Esmeraldo was so called because the Fleming ‘had his old dwelling there, with a house of two storeys, marble pillars in the windows and terraces on top’.

This building, about which a good deal has already been written both in Portugal and abroad, above all because, according to the most persistent tradition, it was Columbus’s residence in Madeira, ought for this and other reasons to be held in still greater respect and cherished with still greater care for its preservation. It deserves this as an example, as beautiful as it is rare from the artistic point of view, of the great aristocratic palaces of the 15th century; as a monument, on Portuguese soil, of a clearly marked transition between the Gothic style and our Manueline, displaying the general form of that style even before it became established in Portugal; and, further, as irrefutable proof, through its sumptuousness and architectural refinement, of the rapid development and progress of Madeira within the first eighty years after its discovery, bearing out what the chroniclers relate about this truly remarkable period of Madeiran history.’

The protest against the demolition of this building, which ought to have been reverently preserved, is made by the author of the passages quoted above, in the words that we reproduce below. They are full of irony but entirely just, and they express our own true feelings on the matter:

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The monument was pulled down; but the Council, in homage to the man who, according to tradition, had been its illustrious occupant, christened the insignificant thoroughfare, barely 30 metres long, with the pompous name of Rua de Christovão Colombo, and everything was thus entirely put right. More than that: the Council rejoiced at its decision. It could pride itself on the glory of having endowed the city with one more public street at a relatively low price; it had met a need of the local merchants, sparing them a few more steps in going from one street to the other; and it had done away with that blackened, irritating eyesore, which served only to astonish a few Yankees passing through Madeira, flanking the empty space with fresh, well-whitewashed walls, symmetrically pierced by the ventilators of two grain warehouses.

The bourgeois spirit of the Funchal councillors was rightly radiant. And so that no one could say it did not know how to honour great men, there on the whitewash of the granary wall stood the name of the discoverer of America: it is not quite clear whether because he had lived in the demolished house, or because he had The distinguished writer and journalist the Viscount of Meireles, who visited this island in 1913, published several articles in the Heraldo da Madeira (‘Madeira Herald’) in March and April of that year, eloquently advocating the idea of rebuilding the house where Christopher Columbus lived on the very spot where it once stood. The lane that now bears the great navigator’s name would disappear, and the Rua do Sabão would be renamed after Cristóvão Colombo. The rebuilt house would be devoted to a regional museum and would become a centre of attraction for foreign visitors, especially North Americans, who would not fail to visit and examine with reverent affection the place where the grand plan for the discovery of their America was perhaps conceived and developed. This would be nothing new, for various historic buildings have been rebuilt abroad to perpetuate the memory of notable events or persons that it was fitting to make more memorable and enduring. Of the old house of Columbus, as we might call it, some photographs fortunately survive, and, what is more, the famous Gothic window, widely reproduced in engravings in numerous books, publications and magazines. Architecture and art would do the rest. We record here the idea of the Viscount of Meireles, which may perhaps, in the near future, yet become an eloquent reality.

This interesting window stands today (1940), artistically and lovingly placed, in the gardens of the magnificent Quinta da Palmeira (‘palm-tree estate’), on the Caminho da Levada de Santa Luzia (‘St Lucy levada road’). The estate belongs to the intelligent and public-spirited industrialist Henrique Hinton, who preserves that precious relic of the past there with the greatest veneration and esteem.

The connection between the life of Christopher Columbus and the history of Madeira, particularly regarding the great navigator’s marriage and his stay in this archipelago, has been briefly set out above. In recent years, however, new works of historical research have drawn this connection closer and offered material for interesting and lengthy studies, which the limited space at our disposal and a proven lack of competence entirely prevent us from undertaking.

Nevertheless, we shall say this. In 1928 and 1929 two curious books by Patrocínio Ribeiro and Pestana Júnior appeared, entitled A Nacionalidade Portuguesa de Christovam Colombo and Cristóbal Colom ou Simão Palha, in which their distinguished authors seek to prove that the illustrious discoverer of America was Portuguese. They were followed by two no less curious volumes under the titles Salvador Gonçalves Zarco (Cristóbal Colon) and Cristobal Colon Salvador Gonçalves Zarco Infante de Portugal, written respectively by G. L. dos Santos Ferreira and António Ferreira de Serpa, and by Artur Lobo de Ávila and Saul dos Santos Ferreira. These attempt to demonstrate, with skilful reasoning but unconvincing arguments, that the great navigator was the illegitimate son of Infante Ferdinand and of a granddaughter of João Gonçalves Zarco. It is well known that Ferdinand, heir and successor of Henry the Navigator in the grand mastership of the Order of Christ (Ordem de Cristo), took a very direct part in the government of our archipelago, which ‘in spiritual matters’ belonged to that order. Needless to say, the Gonçalves Zarco to whom those authors refer is the first captain-donatary (capitão-donatário) of Funchal and the most illustrious pioneer of the early colonisation of Madeira.

Although one may disagree with the conclusions these authors reached, it is only fair to admit that their books make most agreeable reading, and that they contain some material that may be of considerable use to the history of this archipelago.