Island History (commission)

By a ministerial order (portaria) of 17 March 1911, a commission of distinguished men of letters was appointed, some of whom had made their names through their writings on the Adjacent Islands (Ilhas Adjacentes). Its special task was to collect and publish, in a series entitled Arquivo Insular, all the documents that might be of interest to the history of the archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores. The commission set to work without delay and met several times, taking various decisions on the important work to be done. Foremost among these tasks were the publication of old manuscripts and unpublished documents and the reissue of rare and hard-to-obtain works, which would have rendered a notable service to Portuguese culture, and particularly to those who devoted themselves to the study of our early discoveries and the first ventures of our overseas colonisation. For reasons unknown to us, the commission was short-lived and produced no work worthy of esteem, despite its official character and the competence that distinguished every one of its members.