Machico (origin of the name)

In the article devoted to the parish (freguesia) of Machico, we said that the origin of this singular name was not yet known. Despite the research carried out and the various hypotheses and conjectures put forward to explain it fully, the problem remains unsolved. And although the illustrious annotator of the Saudades claims to have resolved it satisfactorily, it is nonetheless certain that his authoritative opinion was not accepted by the distinguished writer and historian Pinheiro Chagas, as we shall see below.

But does settling this point really have any historical importance? Dr Álvaro Rodrigues de Azevedo answers this question in the following terms: ‘...it became important when, in 1868, the Englishman Richard Henry Major, in his work The Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, took seriously the false legend of the supposed Englishman Robert Machin and raised to the status of an argument the false etymology that derives Machico from Machim. He concluded that this legend was a real event, and that his Machim discovered the Madeira archipelago many years before Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira landed there at the end of the first quarter of the 15th century. This opinion, which Major developed with artifice, relying on writings of no historical value, may in future be invoked as grounds for leonine claims – all the more plausibly since the Portuguese government and the Royal Academy of Sciences of Lisbon heaped naive honours on the author of this learned but reserved book, the Life of Prince Henry, whose aim seems to be none other than, while magnifying our legitimate maritime glories, to claim for England the precedence in the actual discovery of the Madeira archipelago. It is therefore worth unravelling the origin of the name Machico, setting historical probability against the inaccuracy spread by Major’.

We cannot follow Dr Rodrigues de Azevedo in every detail of his long, learned and at times tedious account of the origin of this name. Once it is proved – and Dr Azevedo did so in the most complete and conclusive manner – that the Machim story is nothing but a pure and simple legend, it is also demonstrated that the name Machico cannot derive from the unfortunate Robert Machin, the hapless lover of the ill-fated Anne of Arfet. Dr Azevedo’s argument about this origin merely reinforces the force of his tight reasoning in proving that the legend is baseless, but it is not a new proof of the legend’s falsity. Moreover, the account of the Machim story first appears only a century after the discovery of the Madeiran archipelago, which in itself rules out even the mere probability that the name Machico could derive from Machim.

Dr Álvaro de Azevedo traces the origin of the word Machico to a corruption of Monchique, the name of a settlement in the Algarve. Many of the first settlers of this island came from that province, and in all probability so did some of the very crews of Zarco’s caravels. According to information supplied by the illustrious Algarvian Estácio da Veiga and by others who have visited the valley of Monchique, it seems that the orographic and hydrographic conditions of the two places show strong resemblances between Monchique and Machico, and from this circumstance Dr Azevedo draws an argument in support of the view he holds. Against these assertions Pinheiro Chagas sets the following reasons: ‘In the first place (lugar), Zurara, a contemporary of some of the discoverers, writes Machito, whereas it is Cadamosto, who as a foreigner would be expected to distort the word, who writes Monchrico, bringing it closer to the Portuguese word than the Portuguese chronicler himself – which is positively absurd. In the second place, it is no less absurd that the name of an Algarvian town should have been distorted so quickly by the Algarvians themselves. They gave it the name and they corrupted it. The islanders’ pronunciation has nothing to do with such a distortion: first, because in Zurara’s time the colonists were still men born in Portugal and had not yet had time to acquire a distinctive pronunciation; second, because Zurara was not a Madeiran writer but a mainland one, who wrote the name as the Algarvian navigators told it to him. And, we repeat, nothing is less acceptable than the supposition that men born in Monchique, having given a land they discovered the name of their homeland, should not know how to pronounce it twenty years later.’ Camilo Castelo Branco, neither accepting nor rejecting Dr Azevedo’s hypothesis, says that in his view it is superior to all the others. The annotator of Gaspar Frutuoso replied at length to Pinheiro Chagas’s criticism, but it seems to us that he did not refute the illustrious historian’s arguments.

Two years after the publication of the Saudades, E. A. Bettencourt writes in his booklet entitled Memoria sobre a descoberta das ilhas de Porto Santo e Madeira: ‘Nor, in our view, can the name Machico, given to a place on the island of Madeira, serve as an argument for a stay of Englishmen on that island before the Portuguese arrived there. We shall note in the first place, without however making this our chief objection, that the name Machico may just as well be a corruption of Machim as a diminutive of macho [TN: Portuguese for a male mule or male animal]. The popular character of the Portuguese language does not stand in the way of this supposition. Zurara supports it when in his A Chronica (‘The Chronicle’) he calls it Machito, as does Melo himself when he names it Machino. For just as in Africa the point where in 1435 the discoverers landed two horses to ride them into the interior of the country came to be called “Angra dos Cavalos (‘horses’ cove’)”, could not the name Machico, machito or machino likewise have been given to that place on Madeira for a similar reason?’ This opinion is rejected by Pinheiro Chagas and Dr Azevedo.

In 1879 the great writer Camilo Castelo Branco, in his book Historia e Sentimentalismo, included an article entitled A Lenda de Machim, in which he put forward a new origin for the word Machico. He said that it should be pronounced Maquito and that it derives from the Italian word macchia, which means forest, thicket, bramble, etc. This explanation by the illustrious novelist provoked an interesting controversy between him and Pinheiro Chagas, which is published in full in the aforementioned Historia e Sentimentalismo. The annotator of the Saudades does not embrace Camilo’s opinion either.

Seventeen years after the controversy between Pinheiro Chagas and Camilo Castelo Branco, General Brito Rebêlo published, in 1894, an interesting document that sheds much light on the subject with which we have been dealing, and to which we have already referred in vol. X of this work, on p. 174. If it is not decisive proof, it is without doubt the most acceptable presumption so far put forward concerning the origin of the word Machico. The document reads as follows: ‘Charter whereby the said lord gave some houses standing in the rua nova of Lisbon, bordering on houses of the captain-major and on Joham piriz canellas, to Machico, master of his barque, to dwell in for as long as it should be his pleasure, etc. At Alenquer, 12 days of April of the year one thousand and 1417 (1379).’ Archive of the Torre do Tombo (national archives), Book 2 of Ferdinand I, fol. 42. ‘From this document,’ adds General J. I. de Brito Rebelo, ‘there follows the positive fact of the existence in Portugal, in the year 1379 (1417), of a mariner of important rank named Machico; and once such a name is found, the origin of the name by which a certain spot on the island of Madeira was designated is found. Documents of this nature prove facts with complete evidence. It seems to me, therefore, that the following conjecture may be made: the Machico of whom the document speaks, or some descendant of his, went to the island of Madeira on the first or one of the first voyages; through old age, illness or some other mishap he died at a certain point on the coast; his companions buried him, marking the place with a rough wooden cross. This would be the cross that was placed in the original church when it was founded, and which legend later portrayed as taken from the grave of Machim; and the site would come to be called by the name of the first man who honoured with his remains the land until then uninhabited. However the event came about, in this way or another, a hitherto unknown document now raises from the oblivion of almost five centuries the name of the obscure mariner who, assisting in the enterprise to which Prince Henry the Navigator devoted himself, bequeathed his name to a place in one of the loveliest regions discovered through his zeal, and explains the origin of that name. Let the name of Machico, then, be inscribed on the list of the first discoverers. When, therefore, we cite and extol the names of Gonçalves Zarco and Perestrello, let us never forget that of poor Machico, who was perhaps the one who guided them on their bold and fortunate expedition.’

It is evident that Brito Rebêlo carried his conclusions much too far. There are acceptable probabilities in his conjectures, but the truth is that the document transcribed cannot demonstrate that the sailor Machico, to whom Ferdinand I granted some houses in Lisbon, took part in the expedition of João Gonçalves Zarco. It does prove that the name Machico existed in Portugal, which constitutes a new argument against the truth of the story of Robert Machin, and further confirms the account given by Azurara and other early chroniclers of the discovery of this archipelago. The document found by General Brito Rebêlo in the Torre do Tombo (national archives) is nonetheless very valuable and interesting.