Old customs

The old customs and ancient usages of Madeira call for long and careful study, which will receive our particular attention in various articles of this Elucidário. Here we shall merely give a brief account of some facts that characterise many of these customs and that show us, above all, the clear traces of the old feudalism which, in some of its nuances, long survived among the old nobility of this archipelago. Our conquests in Morocco and the holding of the cities and strongholds we had taken had a great influence on the customs of our country and on the private lives of its inhabitants. They bred an exaggerated taste for risky enterprises and for unknown and unforeseen adventures, which showed itself in territorial expansion and the enlargement of the overseas dominions, in the quest for unknown regions and ‘seas never sailed before’, in the hallowed phrase of our epic poet. In proportion to its size, no Portuguese land contributed to our struggles in North Africa as much as the Madeiran archipelago. Its donataries organised great expeditions, with fleets of dozens of ships and many hundreds of men and horses, in which a considerable number of noblemen and knights took a very active part. All this was at the expense of the expeditionaries themselves, without the least cost to the mother country, and often lasted for months on end, during which they performed the most valiant deeds, reaching the point of heroism and recklessness. The Madeiran nobility gained a reputation for courage and daring, while at the same time growing vain of its noble origins and of the independence it enjoyed on its manorial lands. It committed abuses and excesses which the almost unlimited power of the donataries had failed to curb, and which even the authority of the monarch could not correct or restrain, because of the distance between this island and the mainland of the Kingdom (reino, i.e. mainland Portugal). All this had a decisive influence on local customs, as some of the facts we are about to cite, recorded in the old chronicles of this archipelago, eloquently testify: the castellated manor house that the turbulent Garcia Homem de Sousa, Zarco’s son-in-law, built on his lands at Santo António, of which traces still remain, for the bloody struggles he waged against his brothers-in-law; the barbarous and cruel revenge that the first donatary of Machico, Tristão Vaz Teixeira, took on Diogo Barradas to avenge an affront to his house; the tragic death of Dona Aldonça Delgado, murdered by her husband Bartolomeu Perestrelo, fourth captain-donatary (capitão-donatário) of Porto Santo, so that he could marry his cousin Dona Solanda, with whom he was having a love affair; the murder committed by Garcia Perestrelo, who was beheaded for it; the violent and spectacular abduction of Dona Isabel de Abreu by António Gonçalves da Câmara and the struggles and quarrels that followed; and the cases of murder and scandalous rape that Dr Álvaro de Azevedo relates in note XXIV to ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra), adding ‘that here too there were curious types of swaggering noblemen, whose lewd adventures, brutal pranks and shameless crimes tradition has not yet forgotten’. Also characteristic of these old customs were the cavalcades, cane games (jogos de canas, equestrian tournament with thrown canes) and showy skirmishes of Lançarote Teixeira, the hunting reserve (coutada) of João Teixeira and his lavish hunts, the adventures and feats of muscular strength of Marcos Braga and António de Carvalhal, the contests and challenges between Pedro Ribeiro and Domingos de Braga, etc. The donataries of Funchal, seemingly wishing to rival the luxury and magnificence of the court, lived in refined pomp and showy grandeur. They organised costly military expeditions and sent the richest gifts to monarchs and pontiffs, as Simão Gonçalves da Câmara, the Magnificent, did in the embassy to Leo X, and they appeared at the festivities of the royal palace and at princely weddings with such luxury and display that they dazzled everyone, etc. This excessive love of luxury and grandeur was reflected in the Madeiran nobility, leading it into a useless and idle life spent in Funchal or at court, leaving its lands and manor houses in the care and management of none too scrupulous stewards. Striking examples of this are the games, hunts and cavalcades, the skirmishes, contests and fights, and the showy festivities, typified by the banquet at the wedding of António Gonçalves da Câmara and Isabel de Abreu, etc., etc. Before long a large number of houses were ruined and their revenues mortgaged, reducing many to a shameful and wretched existence. Madeira had a considerable number of entailed estates and entails (morgado), as no other region of the country did, and so the number of families leading an almost useless and always unproductive life multiplied; it was even claimed that two-thirds of the land of this archipelago was subject to this extensive and harmful entailment. The original sesmaria (royal land grant to settlers on condition of cultivation) evolved and was transformed into the well-known colonia contract (Madeiran sharecropping tenancy; produce divided, improvements owned by the tenant), which gave Madeiran customs a very distinctive character, above all in the private lives of the tenants and farmhands. The former sesmeiro (holder of a land grant, or sesmaria) became lord of the land and holder of an entail, acquiring, in enforced idleness, habits and tendencies that did little credit to his ancestral lineage. Towards the end of the 16th century a transformation in Madeiran life and customs began. More frequent communication with the mother country and with foreign lands, the growth of trade with many outsiders residing on this island, the departure of countless noblemen and commoners for the wars and adventurous life of India and Brazil, from which they returned with profound changes in their private way of life, the influence of Spanish rule and yet other causes contributed notably to this transformation, which became more marked in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries.