Island History

The full title of this work is ‘Island History’ (Historia Insulana das Ilhas a Portugal sugeitas no Oceano Occidental). Its author was Father António Cordeiro (see that entry), and it appeared in two editions, in 1717 and 1866. Until 1873 it was a very well-known work, highly regarded by everyone interested in the history of the Madeiran archipelago. With the publication that year of the ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra) and the extremely valuable notes that accompany them, however, Father Cordeiro’s work came to be of very secondary value, chiefly because it is a summary, not always free of defects, of Dr Gaspar Frutuoso’s extensive manuscript. Apart from the few pages that some chroniclers had devoted to the history of Madeira, nothing else in print was known on the subject, and for that reason the appearance of Father António Cordeiro’s book aroused genuine interest. As Dr Álvaro Rodrigues de Azevedo points out in the preface to the ‘Longing for the Homeland’, the ‘Island History’ neither replaces Frutuoso’s work nor surpasses it in any respect, because Cordeiro’s work is a summary of the Saudades and goes no further than 1590, the year in which they were written, even though the ‘Island History’ was published in 1717. While Book II of the Saudades fills 300 printed pages, Book III of the ‘Island History’, which deals with Madeira, runs to no more than 44 pages of text in the second edition of this work.

The ‘Island History’ consists of nine books. The first deals with the various peoples who occupied ancient Lusitania, the second with the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, the third with Porto Santo (‘holy harbour’) and Madeira, and the remaining six with the islands of the Azores, to which Cordeiro devotes the greater part of his work. The ‘Island History’ had long been out of print and was already quite rare when a second edition appeared in 1866. It was identical to the first in every respect except for an addendum entitled Algumas notas e adições á História Insulana do padre Antonio Cordeiro na parte relativa á ilha da Madeira, by A. J. G. A. In a brief introduction the annotator, referring to the vast work of Gaspar Frutuoso, says, if somewhat exaggeratedly: ‘this work contained materials gathered without critical judgement, heaps of genealogies, in which its author was strong, set down without order, which called for a man of another calibre, capable of writing a continuous history, free of the many defects that Gaspar Frutuoso himself would perhaps have avoided had he been granted more years of life. Such a man Father Cordeiro was not! He did not undertake this task, nor did he seek to verify the facts related by his predecessor; rather, content to compile them, as Justin had done with the history of Trogus Pompeius, he fell into the same faults as his original, and the ‘The Island Epic’ (Insulana) is still far from perfect’.

In the second volume of the third edition of his Historia de Portugal, Pinheiro Chagas wrongly attributes these notes to the writer Guião. It is beyond doubt, however, that they are the work of the distinguished Madeiran António Joaquim Gonçalves de Andrade (see that entry), dean of Funchal Cathedral (the Sé) (Sé do Funchal), who was living in Lisbon when the second edition of the ‘The Island Epic’ was published. These notes, which fill only thirty pages of text, are very interesting and valuable, and show the author’s profound knowledge of the history of this archipelago.