Fire in the time of Zargo

The burning of Madeira’s forests in the time of Zargo, the first donatary (donatário) of Funchal, is an event mentioned by João de Barros, Frutuoso, António Cordeiro, Manuel Tomás and other authors, and one that tradition has also kept alive. Ferdinand Denis relates that an early French traveller met an old sailor to whom an eyewitness had described the burning of the island of Madeira. According to the learned annotator of ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra), the Torre do Tombo (national archives), in the Livro das Ilhas, folio 84, holds a certified copy of an apostolic brief of Pope Paul II, dated 1469, which clearly alludes to this same fire. Gaspar Frutuoso, the historian of the islands, describes the fire in the interior of Madeira in the following terms: ‘Hence the captain (João Gonçalves Zarco) resolved, seeing that the labour of men could not clear so many trees as had stood on this island since the beginning of the world or of its making, that in order to consume them, so that the land might be tilled and put to use, it was necessary to set fire to them. And since, with the great mass of trees and their great age, some lay felled on the ground and some stood dead and dry, the fire took hold in this valley of Funchal in such a way, and was so fierce, that when the wind blew off the land its flames and heat could not be endured, and the people often took refuge on the islets and in the ships until the weather changed. And because the valley was very thick both with much fennel and with trees, the fire was so stoked that it burned for seven years in the trees, and in the trunks and roots below ground, so that it could not be put out. It did great destruction to the timber both in Funchal and in most of the island along the sea on the southern coast, where it had been decided to clear and cultivate the land.’

Francisco Manuel de Melo, referring to the Madeira fire, says the following in Epanaphora III: ‘I cannot but doubt the fire which (Barros) affirms lasted seven years throughout the island. Against this, it seems, stand the woods that have always remained there, from which timber has been cut for so many years for the making of sugar; of which, they say, there came to be a hundred and fifty mills on the island. These could hardly have been continuously sustained after so universal a fire, still less have grown up after it: but let the credit of such an Author always be preserved.’

Melo’s arguments carry some weight in showing that the Madeira fire neither lasted seven years nor spread to every part of the island. It should be added, moreover, that had the fire been general, as some writers claim, Cadamosto, who also refers to the disaster, could not have said in 1455 (?) that our country produced highly prized timbers, among which cedar and yew stood out. It must also be noted that, for the fire to have burned for seven consecutive years in forests made up chiefly of broadleaved species, not one of those violent downpours would have had to fall on the island throughout that long period – downpours which even today, although rainfall is far less abundant than it once was, flood the inland valleys and give rise to torrents that plunge in cascades from the heights of the mountains.

There is no doubt that many forests in the Funchal valley and in other parts of the island’s south coast were destroyed by the fire that João Gonçalves Zargo imprudently ordered to be set in order to clear the land. But to accept that this fire, spreading rapidly and leaping from tree to tree, came to engulf the whole island seems to us a fantasy born of the rich imagination of Manuel Tomás and other early writers. Nothing in the passage from ‘Longing for the Homeland’ that we have transcribed suggests that the fire was general. João de Barros, the first historian to record the disaster, confines it to the part of the island of Madeira ‘where it is now called Funchal’, adding, however, ‘that the fire took hold of the clearing and of the rest of the woodland, and that for seven years it burned alive in the wilds of those great forests which nature had raised over so many hundreds of years’.

Dr Álvaro Rodrigues de Azevedo states that, since the south of the island was ‘precisely the part cultivated and inhabited immediately after the discovery, it is possible not only that the land there was gradually cleared by burning the virgin forests – a method still used today in the American backlands, for want of labour, for other agricultural and economic reasons, and out of immediate necessity – but also that such clearing by fire continued to be resorted to during the first seven years, without any traces of it being found a short time afterwards. The south of the island of Madeira was the first to be exploited and inhabited, and it is the most productive zone. Only a short period would have been needed for human labour to erase the signs of devastation there. And if the fire is confined to only one part of the island, the arguments to the contrary lose their force. Mello himself doubts not so much the fire as that it was so universal’.

Once the disaster is reduced to the proportions that Dr Azevedo assigns to it, there is no reason for us not to accept it as historical truth, all the more so because, as the same writer says, it is authenticated by the clear allusion in the Apostolic Brief, which is almost contemporary. It was undoubtedly a mistake to order the woods to be set on fire instead of felling them with the axe, but fortunately that mistake did not lead to the complete annihilation of those forests, as has already been seen above.

The fire increased the fertility of Madeira’s soil, which was still marvellous when Cadamosto visited the island. It did not, however, win the approval of Prince Henry the Navigator, who in the early days of settlement drew, it seems, a considerable income from the timber shipped to Portugal.

Frutuoso records that the island had such a quantity of fine, hard timber that great numbers of planks, beams and masts were carried to many places, all of it cut with water-driven mills or saws, ‘of which there are still many today on the north side of the same island: and at this time, because of the great quantity of timber taken from there to the Kingdom, they began to build with it ships with topsails and forecastles, for before there were none in the Kingdom, nor had they anywhere to sail to, nor were there any ships other than the caravels of the Algarve and the barinéis in Lisbon and Porto’.

Zurara, discussing the benefits that flowed from the discoveries made on the initiative of Prince Henry the Navigator, mentions ‘the great heights of the houses that reach to the sky, which were and are built with the timber of those parts’. To this the Viscount of Santarém adds the following note, which Pinheiro Chagas reproduces in his Historia de Portugal:

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This interesting detail shows that the timber carried to Portugal from the islands newly discovered by Prince Henry, chiefly from the island of Madeira, came in such quantity that its abundance changed the method of building town houses: storeys were added and the houses thus raised, and in this way it replaced the Roman and Arab method that had probably been used until then. This probability carries more weight in view of the system of lighting in Lisbon ordered by King Ferdinand, as recorded in certain documents in the archive of the Lisbon Municipal Council.

Zurara, who is extremely laconic about everything concerning the islands, says nothing about the Madeira fire in the Chronica do Descobrimento da Guiné. From what he notes about the height of the houses, however, it can be deduced that, however long-lasting and extensive the fire may have been, enough woodland still remained for the island to export a great quantity of timber to Portugal.