Plague

The scourge of plague, which in former times repeatedly struck Portugal, was also felt with great severity in Madeira in the first and second quarters of the 16th century. Frutuoso, the historian of the islands, refers to it in the following terms:

“

In the year 1521, when King Manuel I died, there was a great mortality from plague in Funchal, from which God deliver us; and because it had been in the city for years, Captain Simão Gonçalves and the Council chose by lot as patron of the same city the Apostle St James the Less, at the end of which they built him a fine house, to which they went in procession. And because, in spite of this, the plague did not cease, in the year of our Lord 1538 God inspired in all, as in one heart, the wish that there should be no longer any chief guards or lesser guards; and in the same procession held on his day, the first of May, they had it proclaimed that all those stricken by this sickness and the healthy should go together, mingled, to his house, where they offered him on the altar the guards’ staves, which are there today in remembrance; and when they returned, the stricken all came back healed; and from that day until today, through the merits of the Blessed St James, there has been no more plague on the island of Madeira, blessed be the Lord! Wherefore, in remembrance of this grace, a great feast is held for this saint on his day, as if it were Corpus Christi.

From what Frutuoso says on p. 221 of ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra), it is clear that the plague that ravaged the city of Funchal did not reach the town (vila) of Machico. Bishop Dom Ambrósio and two visitors stayed there until St James’s Day, in the month of May, when, ‘the danger of the contagious disease having passed, the same visitors came to the city and carried out their office throughout the island, not with that indulgence in which the bishopric had been raised, but rather with great rigour and harshness ...’

Bishop Dom Ambrósio returned to Portugal as soon as he had completed the mission entrusted to him in Madeira. The two visitors were less fortunate: having escaped the plague, they died in a shipwreck off the coast of Sines while they too were returning to the Kingdom (reino, i.e. mainland Portugal). Before leaving, they had committed the greatest acts of violence on the island in order to remove ‘the calluses that vice had formed on the souls of the offenders’, as Dr Gaspar Frutuoso puts it.