Settlement and colonisation

In the article Discovery of the Archipelago we devoted a number of pages to the much-debated question of the first encounter with, or ‘reconnaissance’ of, these distant islands. It still awaits a sound and definitive answer, particularly as regards the date of that auspicious event, the daring navigators who undertook it and the chance circumstances that accompanied it.

What seems beyond doubt is that, once the truth of the event had been recognised and the geographical position of this unexpected find recorded, little time can have passed before active exploration and immediate settlement began, although the details of the first fruitful attempts made to that end are unknown.

Despite the extremely dense forest that covered the whole of Madeira and the incredibly rugged nature of its slopes and hillsides, the first settlers lost no time in exploring the coastline quickly. They made several landings at the most accessible points, as an essential preparation for the colonising movement that was to begin at once.

Many mountain heights, ridges and crags, valleys and ravines, streams, landing places and headlands along the coast were named at that time, and their names have remained for ever inscribed in the toponymy of Madeira. Thus words such as Seixo (‘pebble’), Oliveira, Garajau (‘tern’), Cruz, Formosa, Socorridos, Espírito Santo, Girão, Vera-Cruz, etc., etc., became proper names and came to designate things and places that have survived unchanged through five centuries to the present day.

With the extraordinary development of the various industries and the valuable means of action now so widely at our disposal, we can scarcely imagine what it meant to colonise an unknown island lost in the vastness of the ocean, five hundred miles from the mainland, which kept up communications with mainland Portugal only in the summer season. An old manuscript records ‘that the king and Prince Henry the Navigator had news of Madeira from year to year in the summer, because in those early days no one sailed in winter’.

Besides the innate worth of their race and their tenacious love of work, the early settlers could count only on the great mildness of the climate and the abundant fertility of the soil. Like forerunners of a legendary Robinson, isolated on a deserted and forsaken island, they performed true miracles of heroism in breaking the virgin ground, building their comfortless dwellings and forming small hamlets, which they came to call “settled farmsteads” (fazendas povoadas).

When this auspicious colonisation began, the island was divided for the purposes of public administration into two distinct zones. Their limits were marked by a dividing line running between the point of Oliveira (Caniço) and the point of Tristão (Porto do Moniz). The whole northern coast and part of the southern coast formed the captaincy of Machico, and the rest the captaincy of Funchal, governed respectively by Tristão Vaz Teixeira and João Gonçalves Zarco, as already mentioned in the articles Captaincies and Donataries.

Among the companions and contemporaries of the latter captain-donatary, the names are known of Gonçalo Aires Ferreira, Francisco Carvalhal, João Lourenço, Rui Pais, João Afonso, António Gago, Lourenço Gomes, Francisco Alcoforado, Vasco Delgado, Álvaro Afonso, Aires Lordelo, Vasco Esteves, Manuel Afonso de Sanha and João de Prado, preserved in old chronicles and various books of nobility. All of them obtained land by sesmaria (royal land grant to settlers on condition of cultivation), much of which was entailed by their heirs and successors, who became the founders of the oldest and noblest Madeiran families. See Sesmarias and Entails.

Invested with the broad powers conferred on them by the ‘letters of grant’ and assuming supreme direction of all matters of public administration, the captain-donataries at once became the most eminent settlers of the nascent Madeiran colony. They acquired the greatest prestige and the most dominant influence, which some of them later managed to turn into the award of high titles of nobility and the acquisition of large landed estates.

The old chronicles have left us very little information about the first settlement, particularly regarding the number, social standing, personal qualities and places of origin of the first colonists.

It is known only vaguely that they included people of noble descent, others from the common classes, artisans and tillers of the soil, and also some criminals serving prison sentences. Gaspar Frutuoso tells us that João Gonçalves Zarco ‘had refused to bring those guilty on account of the faith, or treason, or as thieves’. The approximate number of these people is not known, nor is the proportion in which the various social strata were represented in these first waves of settlers. It is conjectured with good reason that they were not few, and that their number soon grew rapidly with the frequent arrival of other colonists and especially with the great legion of Moorish and Black slaves, which quickly became a large multitude. This was demanded by the extensive and arduous work of breaking the virgin ground, the active cultivators being spurred on by the exuberant fertility of the soil and the great mildness of the climate.

It was, however, in the period after the one we are dealing with, that is, in the second half of the 15th century, that settlement grew more substantially. It came from settlers arriving from mainland Portugal and from countless African slaves, and also from many foreigners from various European countries, some of them of old families, who came to seek in this new promised land what their own homeland could not give them.

Settlement began within the area where the city of Funchal stands today, and at the same time at various points considered most suitable for the purpose, such as Machico, Santa Cruz, Câmara de Lobos, Ribeira Brava, Ponta do Sol and Calheta, as well as other places on the southern coast of the island.

The greatest obstacle to immediate and effective settlement was the dense, gigantic forest that covered the whole surface of the land judged suitable for the first agricultural ventures. A violent fire, perhaps recklessly started but also necessarily imposed by the pressing force of circumstances, opened up vast clearings suitable for bringing these wide tracts of hitherto unproductive land under the plough. How far this fire’s destruction reached, and what its immediate consequences were, is not easy to say today; of particular interest on this point is what may be read in the ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra) and its annotations, and also in the pages of the Elucidário Madeirense. See Fires.

The remarkable fertility of Madeiran soil was soon recognised, but it was also readily apparent that the most profitable crops could not reach a high and rewarding level of prosperity except at the cost of a difficult and expensive system of irrigation. And so the first levadas (irrigation channels) appeared.

No Madeiran is unaware of what these aqueducts are: long, narrow channels cut into the ground and generally built of solid alvenaria (local name for compact basalt used as building stone). They carry the precious water that gives the land the blood that makes it fertile, and gives the plants the sap and life that make them yield abundantly.

In the article on levadas (II-235, 269) we have included a detailed study of this important subject, which so closely concerns the economy of the archipelago.

This painstaking labour spent on farming the land was regularly rewarded by the grants that the captain-donataries made to the cultivators, under the instructions they had received from Prince Henry the Navigator and by applying the system of sesmarias (royal land grants to settlers on condition of cultivation) already in use in mainland Portugal. These first grants were later modified with wider privileges: the right to own the improvements (benfeitorias, tenant-made works on the land) was established, together with the power to grant the land on perpetual lease (aforar) and even to sell it, subject to certain conditions that were not regarded as very burdensome or oppressive.

The number of the earliest settlers who came from the mainland was relatively large, but insufficient for farming on a large scale, above all because of the rugged terrain, the density of the forest, the heavy labour of irrigation and other local circumstances.

As stated above, the soil of Madeira was watered by the sweat of Black, Moorish and mulatto slaves, who, by intermarrying with the settlers from the mainland who held sesmarias, so profoundly debased the native purity of the race. At the end of the 15th century there were approximately two thousand slaves on this island, a considerable number beside the European population, which then amounted to some fifteen to eighteen thousand inhabitants.

The system of sesmarias already mentioned, by distributing the land advantageously, favoured the establishment of many “settled farmsteads” (fazendas povoadas), where the first settlers lived with their families and slaves. They soon became the owners of that land and left its cultivation to tenants and slaves. Then came the entailing of land, and the wealthy grantees and the more fortunate tenants abandoned farming and sought, in the more densely populated centres, a life free of the toils of the early settlers. The so-called colonia contract (Madeiran sharecropping tenancy; produce divided, improvements owned by the tenant) was born, and three-quarters of the arable land of this island had been turned into entails and entailed estates.

To determine with true precision the year in which the settlement of this island began, one would need to be able to fix the date of its discovery, which has still not been established with complete certainty. In the letter of grant (carta de doação) from Prince Henry to the Order of Christ (Ordem de Cristo), dated 18 September 1460, to which the publication entitled Alguns documentos do Archivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo acerca das navegações e conquistas dos portuguezes refers, we read: ‘I began to settle my island of Madeira some thirty-five years ago now, and likewise that of Porto Santo...’ From these words it follows that colonisation began around 1425, that is, a few years after the discovery, which agrees with the indications of various chroniclers.

The first priests to perform ecclesiastical duties were the Franciscan friars who came in the fleet carrying the earliest settlers. They served in the various chapels that were soon founded, which would have been those of Santa Catarina, São Paulo and St Sebastian, and perhaps even in rustic, improvised chapels temporarily adapted for that purpose.

On the so-called ‘settled farmsteads’ (fazendas povoadas), established at various points on the island, many chapels were built, each with its own private chaplain. Most of them became ‘curacies’ (curato) and ‘chaplaincies’ (capelania) with the standing of a parish, and they were the seats of the future, legally constituted parishes (freguesia). For this reason, given the evidence the old chronicles provide, it is not easy to determine with complete precision the date on which some of the parishes organised in the 15th and 16th centuries were created, if we take the meaning of these groupings of inhabitants in the sense given to them today. ‘Chaplaincy’, ‘curacy’ and ‘parish’ are terms used, at times interchangeably, to designate what today we very properly call a parish. Thus these chronicles state, and the annotations to the ‘Longing for the Homeland’ repeat, that the parishes of Câmara de Lobos (‘seals’ den’) and Calheta (‘small cove’) were created in 1430, and that the parish of Machico – capital of the captaincy and a village (lugar, settlement rank below a town) intensively settled from the beginning of colonisation – was created in 1450. It is known that this locality came to rival Funchal in its expansion and development, although only in the early days of that colonisation.

It was around 1430 that the first parish was established in Funchal, covering a vast area. Its centre was one of the chapels mentioned above, although some reasons argue in favour of the small chapel of St Sebastian. In 1438 its seat was fixed in the church of Santa Maria, or of the ‘Conceição de Baixo’, which Prince Henry the Navigator had ordered to be built on the left bank of the Ribeira de João Gomes, a short distance from the beach, and which took the name of Our Lady of Calhau (Nossa Senhora do Calhau).

In 1508 the parish moved its seat to the so-called ‘Igreja Grande’ (Great Church), which was still at a backward stage of construction. Fifty years later, that is, in 1558, the city of Funchal and its surroundings were divided into two parishes, with their respective seats in the church of the Sé – Funchal Cathedral (Sé) – and in the church of Santa Maria Maior (St Mary Major).

By the end of the middle years of the 15th century, the period to which we have been referring in particular, there were already ten autonomous parishes in this archipelago, in which all the religious services of independent parishes functioned regularly. Their seats were in the most central chapels existing in these settlements.

It should be remembered that, in addition to the obligatory religious services held at the parish seats, many acts of worship continued to be performed in various chapels, as mentioned above. These were led by other priests and received valuable assistance from various members of the Seraphic Order, scattered among their modest and dispersed convents.

By the end of this period (1425-1450), the work of settlement had already reached a remarkable stage of development: one or two years later, that is, in 1451 or 1452, the settlement of Funchal was raised to the rank of town (vila), with the privileges and prerogatives belonging to municipalities, as happened at about the same time with the seats of the captaincies of Machico and Porto Santo (‘holy harbour’).

Nevertheless, it must be admitted that Madeiran settlement reached its greatest development only in the second half of the 15th century and the first half of the following one. This came with the ever-growing progress of agriculture and of the industries derived from it, such as the large-scale production of sugar and wine, and the export of timber, orchil (a dye lichen), woad and many other agricultural products. Closely bound up with this progress was a great expansion of the settlements. New parishes were created one after another, and the town of Funchal was soon raised to the rank of city. A few years later it became the seat of a diocese, the first to be founded in our overseas dominions.

Although the official grants of the captaincies of Machico, Porto Santo and Funchal to Tristão Vaz, Bartolomeu Perestrelo and João Gonçalves Zargo date from 1440, 1446 and 1450 respectively, it is certain that these first three captains-donatary (capitão-donatário) were invested from the outset with the direct exercise of their offices and privileges, when the settlement of the Madeiran archipelago began around 1425.

It is said that on that occasion Prince Henry the Navigator – to whom these islands had been granted by the monarch, and who was moreover Grand Master of the Order of Christ, to which they ‘belonged in spiritual matters’ – gave the donataries (donatário) the instructions needed to regulate the various branches of public administration, fixing the scope of their powers and perhaps specifying the authority they might use in administering and applying justice. If such instructions existed, as Gaspar Frutuoso supposes and as we are inclined to believe, they were not recorded in any known document, or all knowledge of them was lost when other provisions on the same matter were enacted.

What is known, however, is that the donataries’ powers became truly discretionary in every branch of administration. Many facts prove this, and the charters of grant themselves confirm it, stating expressly that he (the captain-donatary) ‘shall have throughout this aforesaid land jurisdiction, for me and in my name, in civil and criminal matters, saving death or the cutting-off of a limb’. It is clear that, apart from the infliction of the ‘ultimate penalty’ and of the ‘cutting-off of a limb’, which were reserved to the royal power, the governing authority of the captains-donatary extended to all the services of the State, including the collection of the various taxes and dues, the distribution of uncultivated land and the appointment to the various public offices, etc.

In the more important localities the captains-donatary had their representatives in the conduct of public affairs. These were the ouvidores and alcaides, who were specially charged with administrative duties and with collecting the various taxes and dues. Following the example of their chiefs, from whom they received their appointments in the early days of settlement, they not infrequently abused the powers vested in them, and were at times the blind instruments of the captains-donatary’s own high-handedness.

It is well known that only from 1834, when constitutional government was established, did Madeira begin to be administered entirely under the same laws that were in full force in mainland Portugal. Until then the Adjacent Islands (Ilhas Adjacentes) were regarded as overseas provinces, and their public administration was generally conducted under special laws, which often differed fundamentally from those in force on the mainland.

It is not surprising that this discrepancy was even more marked when settlement began, given the unforeseen and extraordinary circumstances of the time, and even leaving aside the arbitrary acts and excesses committed by the captains-donatary and their representatives in the various localities, as we have already pointed out above.

There are weighty reasons for believing that Prince Henry the Navigator gave the first three donataries the necessary instructions when he placed them in charge of the work of the early colonisation. The historian of the islands refers in particular to the ‘Regimento’, the regulations (regimento) that governed the division of this island into its two captaincies and the granting of arable land under the system of sesmarias (royal land grants to settlers on condition of cultivation). These are the oldest measures of government of which any record exists.

For the distribution of plots of land, the already familiar system of sesmarias was adopted (see Gama Barros III, p. 699 ff.), though perhaps with the modifications that local circumstances advised. A sesmeiro (holder of a land grant, or sesmaria) who did not make proper use of the land within five years lost his right to it. These provisions were later modified, and wider privileges were granted to those who cultivated the land, such as the right of ownership of the ‘improvements’ (benfeitorias, tenant-made works on the land) and the power to grant on perpetual lease (aforar) and even to sell that same land, subject to certain conditions which were not then regarded as burdensome or oppressive, as we have already said in a previous article.

We do not know the precise date on which the ‘Regimentos’ and instructions we have been referring to were drawn up and granted, but they must predate the royal letters of King Duarte of 26 September 1433. By these letters the archipelago was granted to Prince Henry, and its spiritual jurisdiction to the Order of Christ, of which the prince was Grand Master. We believe that these royal letters were the full confirmation of grants made earlier, perhaps by John I, the prince having held the entire lordship of these islands since the beginning of settlement.

In the letters granting the three captaincies to the first donataries, the prince mentions a ‘Foral’, a charter (foral), and we do not know whether this was a document distinct from the instructions we have referred to. It certainly existed, however, because the ‘Foral’ granted in 1515 by King Manuel I to the municipalities of Funchal, Ponta do Sol and Calheta contains an express reference to the charter granted by Prince Henry, as can be seen on page 494 of the notes to the ‘Longing for the Homeland’. Elsewhere we refer at greater length to the documents cited here and to the prince’s role in the great enterprise of the early colonisation of this archipelago, and to those pages we direct the patient reader’s attention.

After the ‘Regimento’ and the ‘Foral’ granted by the prince, whose dates are unknown, and the royal decrees of King Duarte of 1433, confirmed by Afonso V, the letters of grant from Prince Henry to the first donataries, dated 1440, 1446 and 1450, are the oldest known documents of a governmental nature concerning the early public administration of this archipelago. They record important legal provisions to be observed, and they also list the high privileges the donataries might enjoy and the various dues and taxes they were entitled to collect.

The archive of the Funchal Council holds the registers of several ‘chapters’ issued by Prince Henry and by the mastership of the Order of Christ, dated 1450 and the following years, towards the close of the period we have dealt with in these articles. They concern the appointment of alcaides, the collection of taxes and other administrative measures, and it would take us too far afield to describe them in detail.

It was, however, in the second half of the 15th century and the first half of the next that many royal decrees on various matters of government were ‘promulgated’. We do not mention them here, as they fall outside the period within which we have set the events briefly recounted above.

Of particular relevance to this subject, we published in O Jornal in July and August 1943 a series of articles under the title ‘Comêço do Povoamento Madeirense – 1425-1450’, of which only a few passages are transcribed above, since it was impossible to reproduce them in full in these pages.