Madeira and Afonso de Albuquerque

Anyone moderately versed in the history of Portuguese rule in the East knows that the great Afonso de Albuquerque, for political, economic and religious reasons, had conceived the bold plan of invading Egypt. Part of this plan was the intention of diverting some of the headwaters of the Nile from their true beds, perhaps by means of a series of laborious drainage works.

What not everyone may know, however, is that Afonso de Albuquerque was counting on the ‘cabouqueiros da Madeira’ (Madeiran quarrymen) to carry out this part of his audacious and perhaps unrealisable project.

It is worth recalling here what we have already said elsewhere about the colossal work of building our levadas (irrigation channels), which always deserves to be given the greatest prominence. For this hazardous and gruelling construction it was at times necessary to skirt high, craggy mountains, cross sheer ravines and tunnel through hills. It was a dangerous and titanic labour lasting many years, costing large sums of capital and even a good many lives, and it gave the land the blood that makes it fertile and the plants the sap and vitality that make them produce abundantly.

The fame of the tenacious and persistent efforts of the early Madeiran settlers in clearing the virgin land, and particularly in the difficult and hazardous construction of the aqueducts meant to irrigate it, had reached Portugal and had reached India.

It is no wonder, then, that the most distinguished governor of India should have thought of the ‘cabouqueiros da Madeira’, as he calls the rural labourers of this island in his most interesting and instructive Cartas, now published in several volumes, to carry out the idea he had conceived for the invasion of Egypt.

As we are unable, at the time of writing these lines, to reproduce Afonso de Albuquerque’s words verbatim, we shall transcribe from Pinheiro Chagas’s ‘History of Portugal’ (III, 322) the passages that concern this subject and fully bear out our assertion.

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What is quite certain, and generally unknown, is that this project, soon forgotten, received, so to speak, a beginning of execution: the governor’s own son, the author of the Commentarios, states that his father wrote more than once to King Manuel I, begging him to send to Abyssinia a few hundred of those peasants from Madeira who were reputed to be the most persevering workers of that age at cutting through mountains, accustomed by the nature of the island’s terrain to levelling mountains and flattening valleys in order to build levadas with which to water their sugar cane more easily.